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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Good Life 



BY 



THOMAS HAMILTON LEWIS, D. D. 

President of Western Maryland College 



METHODIST PROTESTANT BOOK CONCERN 

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND 

1905 



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COPY B- 



Copyright, 1905, by T. H. Lewis 



To L. A. J. 

Because we were boys together: 
have ever been loving comrades: 
and, though now widely separated, 
are still joined in loyalty to 

The Good Life 



INTRODUCTION 



BY 



WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D. 



INTRODUCTION 

I have read most of these sermons, and have 
found profit as well as pleasure in reading 
them. They are good sermons. The title of 
the book promises that the discourses which it 
contains will deal with life, and the promise is 
kept. These sermons take hoid on the hte of 
toaay with a grip as hrm and as fearless as the 
sermons of ^.mos and iriosea and Mican took 
hold oi the lite of their day. They deal with 
problems of the present hour. They make men 
see what the Christian life means now and 
here, in America, at the beginning of the twen- 
tieth century. 

Emerson tells us of listening to a sermon 
while the snow outside was pelting the win- 
dows, and testifies to his feeling that the ser- 
mon was colder, more lifeless, more spectral 
than the snow. One hears such sermons too 
often. They are made up of arid abstractions 
and vapid sentiments. They are as inorganic 
as sand. They touch life nowhere, and have 
nothing in them on which life could lay hold. 
They could have been preached to just as much 



8 The Good Life. 

purpose in the tenth century as in the twen- 
tieth. If the preacher has ever grappled with 
the questions that are daily making life a strug- 
gle for the men and women before him, you 
would never suspect it. You listen and find 
yourself wondering what world this man 
lives in. 

The hearers of these sermons asked no such 
questions, and their readers will not. Some of 
us can imagine how effective they were when 
they were spoken. All into whose hands they 
fall will find that they are not of the class of 
addresses whose value depends on the living 
voice. They are clear and logical, they are 
pithy and pungent, they are fresh and vigorous. 
The young people who have the privilege of 
listening to such preaching ought to be thank- 
ful; for them the way of life is made plain. 
And there is reason to hope that to many, 
young and old, who have not heard them, they 
will be, through the printed page, a "savor of 
life unto life." 

Washington Gladden. 

Columbus, Ohio, 

July 15, 1905. 



PREFACE 



PREFACE 

Some explanation would seem to be re- 
quired of one who presumes to offer the public 
a volume of sermons. The plea offered in 
extenuation of this volume is a very old one — 
"My friends beguiled me and I did print." 
Their solicitation, accompanied by a generous 
offer to defray the expense of the publication, 
left me with a plausible excuse, and this ac- 
counts for the volume. 

When I came to select the contents I found 
several sermons, preached on different occa- 
sions, all bearing on the same subject, some by 
their expressed theme and all by their general 
character, which I thought might be read as a 
more or less connected discussion of the topic, 
"The Good Life." And this accounts for the 
name of the volume. 

All these sermons were preached before col- 
lege students, and in my long experience with 
this kind of congregation I presume I have 
fallen into a manner of expression which will 
seem too elementary to some, too didactic to 



12 The Good Life. 

others, and not sufficiently theological to many 
of those who may read these sermons. I can 
only say in anticipation of these criticisms, 
"Silver and gold have I none." My ambition 
will be satisfied if there shall be found, not- 
withstanding, something practical — in the right 
sense of that much-abused word — something 
to help on the attainment of good living. 

T. H. Lewis. 

Western Maryland College, 

Westminster, Md., July i, 1905. 



CONTENTS 



l.~ THE SECRET OF THE GOOD LIFE. 
II.— EVERY MAN'S VOCATION A CALL OF GOD. 
III.— PERILS OF THE PRIVILEGED LIFE. 
IV.-THE SUPREME KNOWLEDGE. 
V.— IRREDUCIBLE RELIGION. 
VI.— PATRIOTISM. 
VII.— ON GETTING RICH QUICK. 
VIII.— THE GOSPEL LAW OF TRADE. 
• IX.— THE INSIGHT OF THE GOOD LIFE. 
X.— THE REWARD OF THE GOOD LIFE, 



THE SECRET OF THE GOOD LIFE 



THE SECRET OF THE GOOD LIFE 

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; 
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me : and the life which 
I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of 
God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. — Gal- 
atians 2: 20. 

The spiritual experience suggested by these 
words is too high for uninspired speech, and I 
dare not attempt any description of it. But as 
we might imagine Moses considering what 
manner of bush that was which wrapped itself 
in the unconsuming flame of God's presence, 
so, if this experience of the apostle is too bright 
for our eyes to look steadfastly upon, we may 
consider what sort of life it was that furnished 
the ground for this experience. And to en- 
courage us we may remember that Christian 
experience, even the rapturous ecstasy of the 
sanctified, is not some strange and miraculous 
addition to the human life, but its natural de- 
velopment. The New Testament begins every- 
thing with a good life. What the good life 
leads to here and hereafter is the flame on the 
bush. But the good life itself, that is no mys- 
tery nor miracle flame ; it is the common bush 



18 The Good Life. 

growing on every side and easily produced by 
every one of us. Let us see if we cannot find 
its secret in this verse, a message of hope and 
inspiration for us all. 

All life is mysterious and constantly surprises 
us with its beautiful way of unfolding. And 
the good life has its mystery too. Outwardly 
it appears very much like other lives. It is a 
life in the flesh; it seems to be fed from the 
same common spring of appetite and desire ; 
it seems to embrace the same activities and 
aspirations. But this is only seeming. The 
good life is really a hidden life — a life whose 
forms and motions ally it, indeed, to the body 
and the outward frame of things, but whose 
vital secret is sunk in far deeper sources. It 
is born of faith, grows and matures in faith, 
and moves by faith to the ideal whose realiza- 
tion is the glory of the Only Begotten. Yet in 
studying this life we must be content for the 
most part, certainly we must begin, with its 
outward manifestation. 

And the first thing we have to learn about it 
is that the good life is a life in the flesh. The 
apostle is not describing a speculative exist- 
ence in a world of pure spirits. He does not 
hesitate to say that even this ecstasy he has 
been privileged to enjoy has grown out of the 



The Secret of the Good Life. 19 

life he now lives in the flesh, a life among men 
and for men, although not of men. 

And perhaps nothing is more of a hindrance 
to the appeal Christ makes to men to live the 
good life than for us to attach to that appeal 
the suggestion that He would take men out 
of the world in order to make them fit to live 
in it. In all His teaching He emphasizes the 
idea that we have been placed in this world 
for the very purpose of giving us the opportu- 
nity of developing, through trial, unto the ideal 
which is not of this world. "I pray not that 
thou shouldest take them out of the world" was 
His prayer for us at the very moment He was 
taking Himself away from us and leaving us 
to all the risks of failure for want of His 
protection. 

The idea that trie good life can only be de- 
veloped in seclusion and by meditation, or that 
we attain it only as we succeed in destroying 
the instincts and desires of our nature, is not 
found in the New Testament. Christ's good 
man is a good man. A man is converted when 
his faculties and energies are turned around to 
new uses, not when they are exterminated. 
The good life is not too good to live. It must 
act and exert its influence on the framework of 
human nature, employ its activities in the 



20 The Good Life. 

sphere of human interests, making this world 
of sin and wretchedness the arena of its mighti- 
est strivings and of its completest consecra- 
tion. Christ emptied Himself of His heavenly 
glory to take up the form of human nature 
because it was not possible to live the good life 
before men in any other fashion. "He took 
not on Him the nature of angels, but the seed 
of Abraham." St. Paul described himself as a 
new creature, but he did not mean that he had 
been given a new bodily or mental organism. 
He continued to be what he had been in the 
groundwork of his nature and character. He 
had been a learned Jew, and he became a 
learned Christian; he had been a zealous per- 
secutor, and he became a zealous apostle. He 
took his whole nature to Christ, thorn and all, 
glorying even in his infirmities, that the power 
of Christ might rest upon him. 

What folly, then, for us to aspire to the good 
life by evading human conditions and despis- 
ing human instrumentalities, trying to make 
for ourselves a world empty of worldly con- 
stituents! What folly for us to conceive of 
the good life as the development of what we 
call the religious side of our nature ! Christ is 
not divided, and neither are we. We have only 
one nature to live with, and we cannot live the 



The Secret of the Good Life. 21 

good life with a part of it. This is the sad 
hypocrisy of those who think of setting apart 
one day for cultivating the good life, of dis- 
tinguishing between religion and business, of 
making a man good by bringing him into a 
good place, or giving him a good book or put- 
ting into his mouth some form of good words. 

Against all this folly and sin the New Testa- 
ment lifts one inexorable requirement — the 
good life is good living, everywhere and al- 
ways. The Old Testament is repeated in the 
New — "Cease to do evil, learn to do well." 
There is just one life we can live, and that is 
either our whole nature joyously thrust along 
the highway of good thoughts, good feelings 
and good conduct, unconditionally committed 
to this as a sacred vocation and sealed by the 
sacrament of our obligation to Him who gave 
Himself for us; or else it is this same nature 
not so committed and pledged, and conse- 
quently wavering between the good and the 
bad, trying to secure both, and resulting in 
pitiable, irreparable loss of life and character 
as well. 

This is the first condition of the good life. 
We must live it in the flesh ; we must keep noth- 
ing back; we must glorify God in our body 
and in our spirit, which are God's. 



2,2 The Good Life. 

And now we must turn to another word in 
our text of greater import, because it sets forth 
a more important condition of the good life. 
It is a life by faith. 

In a sense this is true of all life, even the 
lowest. The plant sinking down into the soil 
for food and reaching up to the sunshine and 
rain; all the complex phases of animal life 
struggling ever to satisfy appetite, to fight off 
death by higher life — all life is living by going 
out of itself, seeking satisfaction beyond its 
own sphere. The plant must have the soil, the 
animal must have the plant, and man must 
have both to live. The good life follows this 
analogy and seeks its satisfaction in a higher 
life. It is the life of human nature, set amid 
human conditions and pursuing human ends. 
But it is true to the law of all life in reaching 
out beyond itself, and it reaches out by its own 
appropriate faculty, not mere life impulse as 
the plant, nor mere instinct as the animal, but 
by faith. 

Thus the good life makes its protest against 
regarding life as a struggle for the gratifica- 
tion of appetite. When men live so they are 
not only living in the flesh, but by the flesh. We 
see beasts living in this way and do not wonder 
at it, for it is according to their nature. We 



The Secret of the Good Life. 23 

see this life among savages, among the brutish 
element of our population swarming in the 
slums of our great cities, and we do not cry- 
out with indignation for the great pity we feel 
that they know no better. But when we see 
no higher principles of living exemplified 
among the civilized and refined; when our 
leaders in business, in society and politics have 
no other test for any proposal than "What can 
I get?" we feel degraded to the philosophy of 
swine. Man was made upright and with an 
outlook. When he grovels, or when he shuts 
his eyes to what is beyond him, or when he 
values only the setting and framework of life, 
he loses his chief glory as a man, and can lay 
no more claim to the good life than the beasts 
that perish. 

Attempting now very briefly to analyze this 
life of faith which is lived in the flesh, we may 
discern three distinct ideas which distinguish 
it from all other : 

(a) It is a life guided by a divine ideal. 
When Christ came to save men He did not 
bring a theory of atonement or a philosophy 
of salvation. His plan was to transform the 
life men were living, to lead it out from the 
flesh, to make it worthy and eternal. In study- 
ing His words one is impressed that a good 



24 The Good Life. 

life was of more worth in His sight than any- 
thing else. The unique distinction of Jesus, 
however, is not in this; it is rather in the 
method He adopted for persuading men to ac- 
cept the good life as worth everything else. 
His program was simply this: "And I, if I 
be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." It 
is not a new theology that has won men; not 
any form of inducement to human appetite; 
it is simply the personal attractiveness of Jesus. 
It is because He is what He is that men upon 
His invitation have dropped all their own de- 
vices, have forsaken all in which they had 
trusted, and have taken His yoke upon them. 
He does not strive nor cry; His life shines. 
That life is the ideal, and he who sees it is 
forced to measure his own by it and to feel the 
sense of a great lack. This it is that first wakes 
up in us the thought and the desire of the good 
life, and its power is never lost upon us. 
Silently like the sun, irresistibly like the force 
of gravity, this life of Jesus draws all life to it 
and makes all life like it. Yes, we must not 
omit this latter and forget that the life of Jesus 
transforms as well as attracts. There is an 
influence of the ideal upon the low and com- 
monplace in art. But the influence of. Jesus 
is more than this. To see this life is not only 



The Secret of the Good Life. 25 

to see a divine ideal, but to feel a divine 
energy. Jesus' life is more than beautiful ; it is 
omnipotent. The world has been witnessing 
for eighteen centuries transforming wonders in 
human life for which it can give but one ex- 
planation. When it sees wicked men turn to 
righteousness, quarrelsome men turn to peace, 
licentious men turn to purity, and naked, rag- 
ing demons clothed and in their right mind, 
there is nothing to be said but this : "They 
have been with Jesus." 

This ideal knows no limitations of age or 
locality ; it is the hope of the world. Jesus was 
born a Jew, but all nations exalt Him. He 
was brought up a carpenter, but all ranks do 
homage to Him. He lived a brief and obscure 
life, but all life takes Him as its pattern and 
inspiration. He is the ideal of the ages, the 
desired of all nations, the chiefest among ten 
thousand, the One altogether lovely. 

(b) Again, we may say of the good life 
that it is animated by a divine passion. St. 
Paul's account of the effect Christ's life had 
produced in him shows that there was much 
more in it than the mere contemplation of an 
ideal. That is largely, and may be wholly, an 
intellectual process, with no life-giving or life- 
sustaining power ; whereas the apostle experi- 



26 The- Good Life. 

enced a profound movement of the whole emo- 
tional nature as well. The good life must have 
right ideas, but these can never of themselves 
make a life good. The impulses must be right, 
for these are the forces which move us towards 
or away from our ideals. 

And so we observe that the ideal described 
in the text is not an intellectual abstraction, but 
one "who loved me and gave Himself for me." 
This makes the good life a passionately grate- 
ful life. This explains the power Christ has 
over men. When one awakens to a realization 
of what Christ has done for him a great burden 
of gratitude is rolled upon him. It is impos- 
sible for him to live the old life in the light of 
the Cross; impossible to sin against mercy, 
however defiant he may have been of law. 
Wayward and selfish and obstinate as we may 
be in our sin, we are at last melted by the 
glance of Calvary. "Thy reproach hath broken 
my heart." Under the stimulus of this grati- 
tude comes the eager question, "What wilt 
Thou have me to do?" To work for Christ is 
no longer duty, but the rapturous response of a 
grateful heart. This, too, is the secret of the 
bounty of the good life. Its streams are fed 
from the river of Christ's great bounty to us. 
If we minister to the hungry, the naked and 



The Secret of the Good Life. 27 

the sick it is because we find in these the rep- 
resentatives of Him "who, though He was 
rich, yet for our sakes became poor.'"' It is the 
constant burden of the grateful heart to find 
something to render for all His benefits. We 
hold the crucifix before our eyes not in super- 
stitious idolatry, but that we may never forget 
the inscription written there in blood : "This 
I did for thee : what hast thou done for Me ?" 
This divine passion also expresses itself in a 
great renunciation. "1 am crucified with 
Christ." Hence the cross becomes more than 
an incentive to gratitude. It is the significant 
symbol of all good living. As He died on the 
cross, so we live on it. Selfishness becomes the 
most heinous sin. I no longer dare to boast of 
my own possessions, my own performances. 
"The things that were gain to me I count but 
loss for Christ." To live Christ's life is to re- 
nounce our own aims so completely as to be- 
come identified with Christ's aims ; so that it is 
no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me. 
Thus we perpetuate in our measure the life of 
Jesus in the world, and repeat in our spirit His 
sacrifice on the cross. If it means privation 
and obscurity and poverty to keep a good con- 
science and live a clean life, welcome the desert, 
solitude, the cell even, for the servant is not 



28 The Good Life. 

above his lord. If it means loss and persecu- 
tion to do what He would like to have us do, 
we take up the task with enthusiastic gladness, 
for we can do all things through Christ which 
strengtheneth us. There is no type of human 
sin or misery that has not found its antidote in 
this glad surrender to the Crucified. There is 
no possible human daring or heroism that is 
not overmatched by the enthusiasm of the 
Christian disciple. "All for Christ" is written 
over all his doors and graven on his very heart. 

(c) Finally, it may be noted that the good 
life is dominated by .a divine submission. Here 
we enter into that greatest mystery of life — the 
will. The good life which begins with an in- 
tellectual appreciation of Christ as the ideal, 
which saturates itself with the passion of Christ 
as the divine impulse, completes itself in its 
submissive recognition of Christ as its divine 
King. 

St. Paul teaches us the meaning of this sub- 
mission in his significant selection of words. 
It is with "Christ," not "Jesus" he is crucified. 
His faith has submerged him and identified 
him with no less a person than "the Son of 
God." He who bore himself proudly before 
kings and the greatest of his own times would 



The Secret of the Good Life. 29 

not have submitted himself as "the bond slave" 
of any but a divine King. 

And so the good life exalts itself by its choice 
of a King. To confess that we are not our 
own, that we have been bought with a price, is 
not to degrade us if we have been bought with 
blood. It is not to put limitations on us to 
serve the King of the world. It gives us a 
freedom and a power that nothing can resist. 
For this is to be delivered from the chance of 
accident, the whim of variableness, and to be 
taken up into the scheme of the world under 
the sovereignty of God. Oh, what breadth, 
what strength is in that thought! My life, 
then, is not cared for only in the sense that God 
cares for the sparrow, but is itself a part of the 
saving ministry of the Highest. I am made a 
partner of God in His vast designs, and my life 
is one of His agencies in creation and provi- 
dence and redemption. The sovereignty of 
God! Never tell me I must not preach that 
lest I trespass upon human freedom! There 
can be no human freedom except in him whom 
the Son makes free. It is because I have such 
a King that I walk abroad with so free a life, 
that I am not afraid nor wearied nor discour- 
aged. All things are mine, because the govern- 
ance of my life is the order of the universe, 



30 The Good Life. 

because He who is my King is also my God, 
because my life is hid with Christ in God. 

My Ideal, my Passion, my King! Is any- 
thing too hard for Thee? I can live the good 
life when His life is constantly before me, His 
passion constantly throbbing within me, His 
sovereignty constantly ordering all my steps. 
The world calls this crucifixion, and I am con- 
tent, for I know it is life, the richest, fullest 
life, which I can have for the living, and hav- 
ing which I cannot die. 

Will you have this life, dear friends ? There 
are some who make the mistake of supposing 
that the good life is a sort of spiritual luxury, 
which we would be wise to choose indeed, but 
which we can get along very well without, at 
least until we come to die. Do not be deceived. 
There is no choice about the good life except 
the choice between life and death. This life is 
imposed on us as the imperative we cannot 
escape. No man has the right to choose to be 
less good than it is possible for him to be. 
When men are brought face to face with such 
a life as we have been describing they sometimes 
say, "But that is perfection, and I do not claim 
to be perfect," as if with that disclaimer they 
could set aside the obligation ! But no ! It 
pursues us ever. We cannot be absolved from 



The Secret of the Good Life. 31 

the obligation we owe ourselves. We cannot 
refuse the good life with eulogies and hope to 
escape the penalty of choosing a bad life. Nat- 
uralists tell us that when a species fails to ad- 
vance it begins to retrograde. If the bloom of 
this summer is not better than that of last, it 
will be worse. It is the principle of balance in 
motion. As soon as the progressive motion 
ceases the retrograde begins. And so it must 
be with us in our rational life, as indeed it is 
in our physical life. We must go on or we go 
back. He who does not choose the good life 
and resolutely pursue it, does by that passivity 
choose the downward movement and the life 
that constantly becomes worse. In morals, as 
in all life, the fittest survive. The fittest, and 
not the strongest, not the most learned, but 
those who by penetrating deepest into the se- 
cret of Christ, by absorbing most of His divine 
passion, by accepting most completely His 
divine governance, live in Him, die with Him 
and rise again to endless life. 



EVERY MAN'S VOCATION A CALL 
OF GOD 



EVERY MAN'S VOCATION A CALL 
OF GOD* 

Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom 
shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, 
Here am I : send me. — Isaiah 6: 8. 

This familiar passage is associated in our 
minds with the sublimest conceptions. We re- 
member it as part of that wonderful descrip- 
tion Isaiah gives of his vision of the Lord of 
hosts when he was called to his life work. 

But we must not allow this sublimity of 
phrase and picture to deprive us of the signifi- 
cance of the lesson this passage has for us. 
What gives greatest significance to this de- 
scription of God is not, after all, its royal im- 
agery, nor its majestic eloquence; it is the con- 
nection of the interests of humanity with a 
vision of God. God appeared to Isaiah pre- 
cisely when Isaiah most needed God and when 
Israel most needed Isaiah. And what God had 
to say to Isaiah He has at some time to say to 
every man. 



*Sermon before the Twelfth International Chris- 
tian Endeavor Convention at Montreal, Canada, July 
9, 1893. 



36 The Good Life. 

Isaiah lived a truly royal life; he wrought 
out a call of truly royal significance, and 
whether the tradition that he was of royal seed 
be true or not, he will live in our memories as 
he was buried by his countrymen — with the 
kings. 

But the secret of that life and power is no 
mystery. Here it is written out large for us. 
He made himself ready to be called of God, 
and when he was called he went. What he did 
every man may do and ought to do, and in do- 
ing it every man becomes of the seed royal. 
God had use for Isaiah as a prophet-statesman, 
and He called him to that office. Whether that 
office is higher or lower than the particular one 
He designs for us I think we have no adequate 
means of determining. Nor do I think there is 
any force in the general impression that this 
call is a call into the ministry, and that God 
does not call men into all spheres of life as He 
calls them into the ministry. I am not sure 
that Isaiah was called into the ministry in our 
modern sense, but I am very sure that God has 
use for other men in this world besides minis- 
ters, and that when He wants men He calls 
them. I hope, therefore, to justify the use of 
this text to preach that every man's vocation 
is a call of God. 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 37 

1. Life is divine; it is the gift of God. 
When God calls for it, therefore, He calls for 
His own. And as He has made all, it should 
occasion no surprise if He calls for all. 

2. The choice of a vocation is the most im- 
portant act of life, so far as that life belongs to 
this world. I cannot, therefore, believe that 
God would overlook it. 

It is not only the young, who see all possi- 
bilities in a wise choice, to whom it is a great 
matter, but the oldest and the wisest in this 
audience will testify, as they look back upon 
life, that success and failure are bound up with 
this choice. To choose wisely is to secure suc- 
cess with easy effort and unlaborious strife, 
while no energy or perseverance seems suffi- 
cient to conquer the difficulties that spring up 
about an unwise choice. 

But it is more than a question of success in 
getting rich or in getting famous ; it is the tre- 
mendous question of living well, of living 
easily, of living right, rejoicing in life as a 
strong man to run a race. It is so great a ques- 
tion it seems to me, this question of getting 
started to live, that no gospel ought to be re- 
garded complete which, after showing a man 
how to get religion, does not go on to show 



38 The Good Life. 

him how to use his religion while he lives in 
this world. For is there any vocation in life 
which any man has a right to be in which can 
mean any more or less to him than just this — 
to work out before his fellow-men the princi- 
ples he holds as his religion? Choosing a vo- 
cation, then, is simply answering the question, 
How can I best use my religion? And there- 
fore God is in that question. And much more. 
To speak within the limits of sober philosophy, 
human salvation is in that question. For to 
say that a man's vocation has nothing to do 
with his religion, or, in other words, with his 
salvation, is the same thing as saying that a 
man can be saved without any reference to 
what he does. 

3. It is impossible to choose a vocation out- 
side the sphere of God's jurisdiction. 

No fact is pressed upon our attention so 
often, and perhaps none is attended to so little, 
as the fact that God is always interposing in all 
the affairs of this world. God not only reigns ; 
He rules. And He rules not only in a general 
sense, "upholding all things by the word of His 
power," but He is actually present in the things 
themselves, permeating with His all-controll- 
ing will all history, politics and civilization. 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 39 

He can use nature for this purpose, for "He 
maketh the clouds His chariot and rideth upon 
the wings of the wind." But He sends war 
and peace, He blows the sails of commerce, He 
guides the ringers of diplomacy, He whispers 
the secrets of inventions as truly as He sends 
the rain and the sunshine, and for the same 
reason, to reach and govern men. 

Victor Hugo tells us in his dramatic way 
that Napoleon was invincible until the Al- 
mighty joined the coalition against him. And 
this was nearer the truth than the irreverent 
sarcasm of Napoleon himself that God was 
always on the side of the strongest battalions. 
Yet God is always on the side of some bat- 
talion, and not to believe this, not to believe in 
God directing men and events, sending forth 
and holding back the influences that shape his- 
tory and save the world, is not to believe in 
God at all. "God is not the God of the dead, 
but of the living.' ' 

If we believe in such a God, why, then, 
should we not have a real faith also in His 
sending men into this or that vocation as it 
pleaseth Him, to work out through them the 
history of the world as He has designed it? This 
is not fatalism; it is simply believing that if 
there is anyone who has planned the history 



40 The Good Life. 

of this world (and see if you can help believ- 
ing that?) then He would use the most effective 
means for realizing His plan. And if men, far 
more than all other forces combined, are the 
makers of history, then He would use men. 
And if history is shaped not by the few, but by 
all who labor at its mysterious loom, then He 
would send men into life everywhere, and not 
only into those stations men might agree to 
call holy or distinguished. 

Let us remember those who fell in the wil- 
derness because "they limited the Holy One of 
Israel." And let us remember that the omni- 
presence which the ' Bible teaches is not the 
presence of a ghost or an influence, but the 
presence of an Almighty Person. If I ascend 
into heaven, if I make my bed in hell, if I take 
the wings of the morning and dwell in the ut- 
termost parts of the sea, "even there shall Thy 
hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold 
me." It is this doctrine of an energized omni- 
presence which men have recognized instinct- 
ively in designating their profession or busi- 
ness or manner of working, a vocation, that is, 
a calling. But who is there to call if God be 
left out? There is no power or authority in 
this universe great enough to call man unless 
it be God. It is man's personal dignity as well 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 41 

as his longing that enables him to say, "Whom 
have I in heaven but Thee ?" 

So I say the man who enters a profession or 
refuses to enter without reference to God and 
His call may designate himself by what name 
he will, but he is practically an atheist, for to 
him in the largest portion of his life "there is 
no God." 

4. This atheism in business is perhaps the 
most deadly assault against Christianity in our 
day, for it establishes selfishness as the supreme 
motive of work, and selfishness is antichrist. 

You will find men belonging to societies 
holding Jesus Christ as their supreme Lord 
who practically refuse to allow any interference 
with them or with their schemes for six days 
of the week. On the seventh day they enter 
His house to listen to His instruction and to 
invoke His blessing, closing every prayer with 
a petition to "enter heaven at last," without any 
notion apparently that the way to heaven for 
every man lies through the work and experi- 
ence of the coming six days. 

No. Christ to them is the King of Sunday. 
They refer to Him all Sunday questions, that 
is, questions of religious belief, of religious ex- 
perience, and such conduct as involves princi- 
pally questions of morals. But how small a 



42 The Good Life. 

part of life do such questions take up for most 
of us ! May we not, without extravagance, say 
that the ordinary citizen does not know he has 
a creed unless some heresy gets noised abroad? 
May we not say that few persons refer to their 
religious experience in settling practical ques- 
tions of business ? And while I would not in- 
timate that the ordinary citizen ignores moral 
principles in conduct, it will be granted that the 
ordinary citizen does not use unmixed moral 
principles in conduct to any large extent. But 
put them all together and take the sum out of 
the aggregate of life, and have you not left 
vastly more, as men count, than you have 
taken ? Have you not left six days in the week ? 
Have you not left that whole range of activities 
and interests called the business of life ? Have 
you not, in fact, taken out just what you sup- 
pose God can be appeased with, and left every- 
thing that you really want until you have to 
die? 

This is what I mean by saying that men are 
atheists in business, and that they make selfish- 
ness the supreme motive of work. So far from 
being regarded extravagant, it will strike most 
persons, I fear, as a truism. Men look for this 
sort of thing in business, and although they 
might object to calling it seffishness, yet that 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 43 

a man has the right to select what business he 
pleases and conduct it as he pleases so long as 
he violates no moral law, this is supposed to be 
conceded by all. But it is not conceded by 
Jesus Christ. Consider, I beg you, how gro- 
tesque this view of life becomes the moment 
we hold it up to the cross ! In the light of that 
awful splendor how dare we talk of doing what 
we please or as we please ? 

Our theory of the world is that it is lost. As 
Christians we are associated to regenerate it. 
To this end we pray and preach and organize 
societies. But if there is anything true and 
vital in such a theory, why do we not take the 
most effective method of realizing it? Is the 
regeneration of the world so small a matter 
that we can afford to give six-sevenths of our 
time to something else? And if we are not 
here to regenerate the world by our work as 
well as by our prayers, why do we not stop 
claiming to be servants of Christ, and only 
claim to be what we really are — worshipers at 
His altar? 

God's condemnation of this folly, this crime 
of selfishness, is written on every page of His 
Word and in every act of His blessed Son. But 
in our day He is writing sentence against it in 
other and unexpected places. Through the bit- 



44 The Good Life. 

ter cry of the wretched He is voicing an in- 
dictment against a selfish social system and 
religious forms that support such a system. 
Men are becoming infuriated through a long 
oppression, and their fury makes them blind 
and wicked, but He who "maketh the wrath of 
man to praise Him" will not abate the fury nor 
deliver us from the peril of this wickedness 
until the wrong is righted, 

"And man to man the world o'er 
Shall brothers be and a' that." 

We have in our holy religion the beautiful 
principle that "the strong ought to bear the 
infirmities of the weak," and God, through His 
oppressed, is bringing against us the serious 
indictment that we conduct our business on 
the principle of the survival of the strongest, a 
principle of brutes and savages. We drive the 
weak to the wall by our superior strength and 
shrewdness. We do this for six days, and then 
offer them on the seventh some platitudes on 
resignation. We show them for six days a 
business with no religion in it, and then expect 
to charm them on the seventh by a religion with 
no business in it. But God has put the ever- 
lasting arms under this "submerged tenth," 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 45 

and it shall not sink down to hell for all the 
maledictions of selfish men. 

What will convert us from our egregious 
folly? Must God send a moral earthquake to 
overturn our whole social system before we 
will learn that we cannot rise by putting men 
under our feet ? Are we so stupid that we can- 
not see that we shall never regenerate the world 
nor save our own souls by giving more money 
or more churches or more missionaries, but 
only when we follow the noble Macedonians 
"who first gave their own selves to the Lord ?" 
Until we can believe and act as if we believed 
that God sends forth every workman as truly 
as He sends the preacher, and that every man 
who works right works for God first and for 
his fellow-men next and for himself last of all ; 
until, in fine, we abandon our atheism in busi- 
ness we will never reach the masses. And God 
forbid we should! for we would but petrify 
them into our own indifference and selfishness. 
"Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar 
and there rememberest that thy brother hath 
aught against thee, leave there thy gift before 
the altar and go thy way ; first be reconciled to 
thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift." 

5. The theory that every man's vocation is 



46 The Good Life. 

a call of God is the divine theory of life, and 
will therefore teach us the true idea of conse- 
cration. 

Men used to think they consecrated them- 
selves to God by hiding themselves in the for- 
est or shutting themselves up in a cell. And 
I fear we still fritter away the meaning of this 
great word until we have nothing left but an 
ideal hung in the air or an emotion flowing out 
at the eyes. 

Consecration as frequently used in the Old 
Testament means literally "to fill one's hands." 
And certainly this is what, above all other 
things, it ought to mean in these New Testa- 
ment times. These are the times that quiver 
with flesh-and-blood questions, and we must 
consecrate ourselves to what is here, and not to 
what we suppose is in heaven. We must "fill 
our hands" to God in this world if we do it at 
all, and that is the meaning of His call. 

Do you remember the call of Bezaleel? 
"See," said God to Moses, "I have called him 
by name and I have filled him with the spirit 
of God in wisdom and in understanding and in 
knowledge." Well, what for? — "to devise cun- 
ning works, to work in gold and in silver and 
in brass." Do you say that this was a call to 
build his tabernacle? But I tell you God is 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 47 

building a far more glorious tabernacle than 
Moses reared in the wilderness. "The taber- 
nacle of God is with men." On the bright 
plains of this nineteenth century He is building 
it, and "they bring the gold of the nations into 
it." Its walls are salvation and its gates praise ; 
it is the temple of redeemed humanity, and it is 
built out of the hopes and prayers and labors 
of God's faithful servants. And still He is call- 
ing, "Whom shall I send and who will go for 
us?" "Who will build for Me these walls? 
Who will bring his wisdom or his genius or his 
wealth and consecrate these to rear up this tab- 
ernacle of humanity?" Oh, that we had the 
ambition to reach up to this great consecration ! 
a consecration like that of Aaron, whom Moses 
anointed "with the blood upon the tip of his 
right ear, and upon the thumb of his right hand 
and upon the great toe of his right foot;" a 
consecration that leaves no organ nor faculty 
for the service of the devil ; a consecration that 
liberates every power and makes every nerve 
tingle with the fire taken from off the altar. 
Oh, that we would cease the folly of sighing 
for someone to come to us from afar and bring 
us a consecration ready made, and look right 
at our hands which are to work out for us the 
only consecration we shall ever know in doing 



48 The Good Life. 

for God whatever we do and whatever is to be 
done for the helpfulness of man. 

6. This theory defines the true dignity of 
labor ; it is the divinity of labor. 

Why is it that to some men life seems not 
worth living? Why is it that work seems so 
hard and the distribution of rewards so unfair 
and God so altogether unlovely? Why is it 
that some men cry out so fiercely for the dig- 
nity and rights of labor? Do they see more 
than other men? Nay, rather they see less. 
They have left out of their creed the key to the 
whole riddle of life -to the workingman. They 
have been taught the shibboleth of political 
parties and the mottoes of unions and frater- 
nities, but the one thing yet unlearned is the 
creed of the man who has been with Jesus and 
learned of Him to say, "I believe in the divin- 
ity of labor." It makes all the difference be- 
tween a curse and a blessing whether we be- 
lieve labor is from the devil or from God; 
whether we believe the man who works is a 
slave or a son, the lawful seed of Him who 
made the world and the brother of Jesus the 
carpenter. 

I remember well how disappointing was my 
first view of Italy. I had heard of Italy as the 
artist's paradise, the land of sunny skies and 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 49 

vine-clad hills. I had heard that they who love 
the beautiful do there drink in perpetual de- 
lights and revel in all the harmonies of nature 
and art. But when I landed at Brindisi I saw 
none of these. I saw instead only a straggling 
town with narrow, crooked streets, whose som- 
ber houses shut out all beauty of sky and hill, 
and I heard only the discord of unfamiliar 
voices speaking an unknown language. But 
what then ? I had not seen it all. Wandering 
along those streets I came presently to the open 
country. I ascended a gentle hill, and there I 
saw what I shall bless God forever that He 
opened to my eyes — an unclouded sunset in an 
Italian sky. I cannot describe it to you. I 
never put it into words, but I know as I stood 
there in the bewildering beauty of that sky I 
forgot Brindisi, I forgot all the ugliness I had 
ever seen and all the discord I had ever heard 
and all the hate I had ever felt. The radiant 
splendors from above fell over the earth, fell 
over my life, and kissed every visible thing 
and every remembered thing into transcendent 
glory. 

So I think I know men who look at their 
work as I first looked at Italy — they see no sky. 
They see the curse, they feel the sweat, they 
hear the stern voice of hunger driving them 



50 The Good Life. 

forth to daily tasks, and their eyes are fastened 
sternly on the ground and "they groan, being 
burdened." But, oh, my brothers, lift up your 
eyes to see also the sky! There is a glory 
shining there which will fall on your labors if 
you will bring them out from the close wall of 
your covetousness and selfishness, and its 
splendors will transfigure your despised tasks 
and make your common life seem a piece of the 
divine. Have you not heard it? — "Whatsoever 
ye do, do all to the glory of God." There is 
the powerful alchemy of the Gospel which sub- 
limates drudgery. 

"A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine. 
Who sweeps a house as for Thy laws 
Makes that and the action fine." 

It is the privilege, therefore, of every true 
believer of the Gospel to say, I believe in the 
divinity of labor. I believe that what I do for 
the love of God is godly, whether I do it on 
Sunday or Monday. I believe that a life on the 
cross may be as precious in God's sight as a 
death on the cross. I believe that the spirit, 
the motive, of my work consecrates me and 
glorifies my work — 

"Makes that and the action fine." 



Every Man's Vocation a Call of God. 51 

And so there comes a great liberty. I am no 
longer the slave to times nor a cringing beggar 
to circumstances. Up from all sordid things 
my heart swells with the joy of deliverance, 
and I cry out with the gladness of a new dis- 
covery, "O Lord, truly I am Thy servant; I 
am Thy servant and the son of Thy handmaid ; 
Thou hast loosed my bonds." 

My brothers, the time has come for the last 
word of this great and interesting convention 
to be spoken. You have done me great honor 
in putting me in this place, but not to me be- 
longs the supreme honor of the final word. 
God has spoken many times and in diverse por- 
tions since we assembled, but even He does not 
wish to speak the last word. It is you who 
must speak it. As you look out over the fields 
of human endeavor where men are struggling 
for self, oh that you may hear His voice calling 
you to go forth to make them all fields of 
Christian Endeavor, and say, as the final, su- 
preme word of the convention, "Here am I; 
send me." 



III. 

PERILS OF THE PRIVILEGED LIFE 



PERILS OF THE PRIVILEGED LIFE 

And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan 
hath desired to have you that he may sift you as 
wheat; but I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail 
not. — Luke 22: 31, 32. 

The significance of these words is best un- 
derstood by the contrast suggested in the dis- 
course from which they are taken. The occa- 
sion was that last solemn meeting of the dis- 
ciples with their Lord before the crucifixion. 
The sorrow that should have overshadowed 
all hearts and subdued all their thoughts in the 
prospect of that dreadful event, so clearly por- 
trayed by what Jesus did and said in this meet- 
ing, seems not to have been sufficient to pre- 
vent a vulgar strife from breaking out among 
them, "which of them should be accounted the 
greatest." In rebuking this spirit our Lord 
also instructs it. How little did they know of 
true greatness ! While they are struggling here 
over a poor question of precedence they forget 
the real greatness to which they have been ap- 
pointed by virtue of their association with the 
Son of Man in His humiliation. "I appoint 



56 The Good Life. 

unto you a kingdom, as My Father hath ap- 
pointed unto Me; that ye may eat and drink 
at My table in My kingdom, and sit on thrones 
judging the twelve tribes of Israel." And more 
than this; not only are they ignorant of the 
real greatness, but they do not know that all 
greatness carries with it necessarily a respon- 
sibility and danger which might make the 
stoutest heart shrink from accepting it on such 
terms, and pray to be left in the safety of ob- 
scurity. Because they had continued with Him 
in His temptations, they should rise to a share 
in dominion with Him. But, by the same inev- 
itable logic, because they should come into this 
kingdom and sit on thrones, "Behold, Satan 
hath desired to have you that he may sift you 
as wheat," and Satan's demand must be con- 
ceded. It is in accord with the just and inflex- 
ible nature of things. 

I think it cannot fail to sober your thoughts 
on this triumphant occasion that celebrates the 
completion of many days of toil and your en- 
trance into the kingdom of scholarship to re- 
flect upon this conjunction of peril and privi- 
lege in the lives of the apostles. It will doubt- 
less seem to you not a peculiar case, but deeply 
significant of life everywhere. He who strives 
after greatness is consciously or unconsciously 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 57 

striving after peril. We might conceive of per- 
fect, unhindered life as a plain, but as soon as 
that perfect evenness is disturbed it becomes 
impossible to lift or depress the whole of that 
life together. Any fragment of it lifted into a 
mountain here must depress another portion of 
it into a valley there. This is life as we know 
it individually and collectively. To rise to any 
privilege means to leave a portion of us inevit- 
ably exposed to peculiar peril. To illustrate 
and enforce this thought is the purpose of this 
discourse and the reason for describing my 
theme as 'The Perils of the Privileged Life." 

To justify the selection of such a theme for 
this occasion, let us consider what we may call 
a privileged life. 

We may turn away at once from all thoughts 
suggested by the phrase "privileged classes," 
not because those who have been raised by law 
or custom to places above the average, or those 
who have exceptional advantages by birth or 
accident or great wealth, are not privileged, 
and are not, therefore, subject to many and pe- 
culiar perils. We may turn away from these 
because the exhortation to these is sure to be 
attended to. The insincerity with which men 
speak the truth is one of the most melancholy 
spectacles of this superficial age. Men cry out 



58 The Good Life. 

against the privileges of the privileged classes, 
while their conduct reveals their intention only 
to denounce the privileges they have not yet 
secured for themselves. Men groan over the 
evils of capital till the jingle of their own hard 
coin heals the hurt that honor feels. They 
write platforms to denounce one-man power, 
but are none the less willing to occupy the chair 
they have forced another to vacate. 

Much remains, doubtless, to be said and to 
be done with reference to the privileges of 
others, but let us occupy ourselves today with 
a much humbler task.. He that would reform 
society will make the safest beginning by re- 
forming himself. Let us think of our privi- 
leges and their accompanying perils. 

Speaking here, we must mean by a privileged 
life a life of opportunity, and specifically the 
opportunity of preparation. If we will but 
incline our ears we may hear Wisdom calling 
at our gates and saying to those who are to 
pass out today: "Because ye have continued 
with me in my temptations" — the labors of the 
classroom and the laboratory — "I appoint unto 
you a kingdom, and ye shall sit on thrones " 
But shall we hear no more than this ? Shall we 
rush on before we hear this same voice ten- 
derly saying to us : "Behold, Satan hath de- 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 59 

sired to have you" — and because of the posi- 
tion you have attained he must have you — "to 
sift you as wheat ; but I have prayed for thee" 
— whoever thou art, weakest of all and most 
liable of all— "that thy faith fail not." 

It requires no stretch of the imagination to 
apply these words of our Lord to college stu- 
dents. The men and women now in the schools 
of this country are enjoying opportunities of 
preparation for a great and honorable life be- 
yond any that have ever been known. To 
make good this assertion it is only necessary to 
sketch the outlines of an inventory. What is 
most patent to all, and by no means least sig- 
nificant, is the wonderful diffusion of this op- 
portunity. This means not only that there are 
so many more colleges and so many more stu- 
dents than ever before, but that they represent 
so large a constituency. They come from every 
grade of society. Every hamlet, every neigh- 
borhood has its boys and girls in college. 
Fathers who would have thought in their boy- 
hood that colleges were hopelessly beyond their 
ambition now find it possible to give their chil- 
dren advantages they were denied. To this we 
must add the marvelous improvement in the 
facilities and appliances of education, making, 
if not a royal road to learning, a road as differ- 



60 The Good Life. 

ent from that traveled by previous generations 
as our ballasted steel-railed highways are dif- 
ferent from the rough, muddy country roads 
of a new settlement. A child may learn more, 
and learn it easier, now in a month than he 
could then learn in a year. To this we must 
add the exactness and comprehensiveness of 
the science of the present day. Superstition 
is on the rout in every field of knowledge, and 
a boy to enter college must now know enough 
science to fit him to demonstrate that much of 
the science of the last generation is ridiculous. 
Finally, that must be added to the account 
which is perhaps most significant of all, the 
adjustment and correlation of education with 
all the working forces of life. Learning is no 
longer a little information on this or that sub- 
ject; it is a scheme of life. Colleges no longer 
train this or that faculty; they train the man. 
Men and women are taught how to harmonize 
all the human forces with the intellectual in this 
battle against ignorance, and they go out to 
live knowing what the foes of life are and with 
what weapons they may be best subdued. 

Who can give a moment's consideration to 
this inadequate but still splendid inventory 
without a thrill of exultation that he has come 
on such a time ? Never was so much done and 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 6i 

never were so many beneficiaries of that doing 
in the world of culture as may be seen today. 
This is our privilege — to live today, to be learn- 
ing today ! 

"We are living, we are learning in a grand and awful 
time — 
In an age on ages telling ; to be living is sublime." 

Now, this state of privilege must be consid- 
ered as to the responsibilities it brings. You 
may not have accustomed yourself to consider 
it, but the bare mention of it will be enough to 
awaken you to its reasonableness. You do not 
suppose for one moment that the educated man 
or woman of today can stand with the past in 
responsibilities while sharing with the present 
in opportunities. Even our imperfect admin- 
istration does not measure out such incongru- 
ous judgment. When we find a man gaming 
wealth, we lay on him a wealthy man's tax. 
When one comes into a position of power, we 
exact of him the powerful man's duty. No- 
blesse oblige is the inexorable sentence we ap- 
ply through all the grades of honor that lift 
men above their fellows, and the obligation 
keeps exact step with the nobility. It is on this 
principle that we try every man of what sort 
he is. You must count on no exceptions to this 



62 The Good Life. 

rule. For every day spent in the seclusion of 
the study; for every secret of nature unfolded 
to you in the laboratory ; for every opportunity 
afforded you to associate with the wise and 
great of all ages, and to draw inspiration from 
the great fountains of learning, be sure there 
will be exacted of you rigorously all the stu- 
dent's responsibilities. Critics abound on every 
side, and they are even now demanding to have 
you that they may sift you as wheat. They in- 
tend to test your pretensions; they will chal- 
lenge you to a trial of your abilities, and they 
will force you to show cause why you should 
have been given such privileges and what you 
can do with them that other men cannot do as 
well without them. 

In the prospect of such an ordeal it may oc- 
cur to some of you to draw back, to reverse 
your decision, to abandon the life of the 
scholar and go back to the life you left. But 
no ; you cannot go back. In starting upon this 
career you have made an irrevocable decision ; 
you have written down your name as a privi- 
leged man, and you will not be permitted to 
erase it. You may as well reckon upon it hence- 
forth that you are to be challenged ; you are to 
be put to the test; you are to be sifted and 
treated in all respects as an educated man. 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 63 

I mean to keep back no part of the truth from 
you, and hence I must add another item to the 
account. It may seem a fearful and an unnec- 
essary addition to your peril that, besides the 
disadvantages and obstacles found in merely 
human conditions, you should have to reckon 
with another enemy more powerful and more 
malignant than all the others combined. Yet 
every teacher finds it necessary to say to his 
students as Jesus said to His : "Behold, Satan 
hath desired to have you that he may sift you 
as wheat." 

Nor does our Lord suggest that this desire 
of Satan is presumptuous or unreasonable; in 
fact, the word by which He expresses it ac- 
knowledges it to be legitimate. We ought not 
to translate this word "desired," but "de- 
manded." Satan has asked what he has a right 
to have; he has made a legitimate demand. 
Hence Jesus suggests no hope of evading this 
trial ; He states the fact, not to give the apos- 
tles time to escape, but only to prepare them 
for what is coming. 

Are we to think that this master-spirit dis- 
dains to attack any less eminent than Jesus and 
His apostles? Nay, my friends, neither is 
Satan any respecter of persons. In whomso- 
ever he finds the least promise of good, the 



64 The Good Life. 

smallest outbreathing for a purer and larger 
life, there he finds foemen worthy of his su- 
preme effort. He will search your pretensions in 
morals more closely than any critics will try 
your culture. And those who love you most 
must look on and refuse to interpose any bar- 
rier. They must say to you in the words of the 
apostle, to whom they were so deeply signifi- 
cant: "Beloved, think it not strange concern- 
ing the fiery trial which is to try you, as though 
some strange thing happened unto you." No ; 
it is a perfectly natural thing, a reasonable 
thing to one who considers what this excellence 
is you are aspiring- after and calling virtue. 
Hear the noble words of Milton: "I cannot 
praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexer- 
cised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and 
sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, 
where that immortal garland is to be run for 
not without dust and heat. Assuredly we 
bring not innocence into the world; we bring 
impurity much rather. That which purifies us 
is trial, and trial is by what is contrary, That 
virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in 
the contemplation of evil, and knows not the 
utmost that vice promises to her followers, and 
rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure." 
But not only is untested virtue practically no 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 65 

virtue at all; we have no right to refuse the 
test because of malignity in the critic. No 
malice in the mind of him who tosses the win- 
nowing shovel can make the wheat blow away 
nor the chaff come down again to the floor. 
Hence the true man offers no propitiatory sac- 
rifices to Satan nor begs of him leave to be vir- 
tuous. He expects him to do his worst, know- 
ing that virtue is what remains after the con- 
flict. He goes into the fire, knowing that all in 
him worth saving will come forth without the 
smell of fire on it. He builds his house, asking 
no favors of the winds ; he only asks to dig to 
the rock, knowing that wind and flood only cry 
forth the praise of the house that is founded 
on the rock. So even Satan may bless us in 
hating us, for "Blessed is the man that endur- 
eth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall 
receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath 
promised to them that love Him." 

Since then we may not escape peril in laying 
hold of privilege, nor find any refuge in avoid- 
ance, what is our resource? "That thy faith 
fail not." So I understand our Lord's words. 
Not that the boon He asks for His disciples is 
that whatever else they may lose they may 
bring off at last their faith, but that having this 
they may conquer. He directs attention at 



66 The Good Life. 

once to what will be not only Satan's chief 
point of attack, but their own invincible weapon 
of defense. If Satan destroys their faith, noth- 
ing will be left worth fighting for; they have 
lost "the substance of things hoped for, the 
evidence of things not seen," their only title to 
the only life worth living. On the other hand, 
"taking the shield of faith," they "shall be able 
to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked." 

Surely these are both strong reasons for the 
most careful consideration of faith as applied 
to your surroundings as students. You have 
the strongest of reasons for inquiring why stu- 
dents should be exhorted to "contend earnestly 
for the faith once delivered to the saints," and 
I as God's messenger for endeavoring to point 
out to you in utmost frankness and sobriety 
what this faith is and how your privileges as 
students put you in peril of losing it. 

I shall be brief in my definitions, both be- 
cause I have really a very simple matter to de- 
fine, and because I am persuaded your thought- 
ful attention must have been directed already 
to the prevalence of faith in all your studies. 
You must have seen how the physical sciences 
refuse their secrets to the man without faith 
in an order of nature and in the reign of law ; 
how even mathematics no less than metaphysics 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 67 

depend for all their conclusions on faith in the 
intuitive powers of the mind, and how we must 
first believe in the laws of thought before lan- 
guage or discourse can tell us anything. But 
I am not thinking of these kinds of faith ; much 
less am I endeavoring to bind you to a belief in 
some or any specific form of dogmatic truth 
about the Bible or Divine things. I have in 
mind solely the simplest and ultimate form of 
faith; I mean faith in invisible realities and in 
Jesus as the incarnation of those realities. The 
man who loses this faith loses the explanation 
and the impulse of life. Yes, we may say it 
quite literally, not to believe in Jesus and in the 
invisible kingdom He stands for is not to live. 
It is the darkness of a mere material existence, 
the pessimism of a spiritless knowledge. If I 
do not stop here to demonstrate this, it is be- 
cause I know we are in perfect agreement upon 
this point. You all believe this now, and my 
special object is to warn you lest any man rob 
you of this priceless possession. 

How, then, has your educational privileges 
brought you into the peril of losing this faith ? 
This is a question easily open to a flippant re- 
joinder. It may be said, alas ! it constantly is 
said, that whatever will not bear the scrutiny 
of learning ought to be given up, and the faith 



68 The Good Life. 

that shrinks from its bright light of investiga- 
tion is, after all, little better than superstition, 
with tradition for its father and ignorance for 
its mother. But when we remember that the 
faith which is judged in this summary way is 
a look into a world which learning has no eyes 
to see and never would have known but for the 
report brought to it by faith, such criticism will 
seem too much like the owl instructing us in the 
right use of light to be taken seriously by 
thoughtful minds. 

But this very attitude of learning towards 
faith suggests one of the perils we need to 
guard against. To some minds whatever is 
knowable seems only matter for intellectual ex- 
ercise. They know no keener pleasure and they 
conceive no higher good than just to know. 
Knowing thus comes to be regarded the su- 
preme thing — the all-sufficient thing — and 
whatever is not of knowledge is felt to be either 
unreal or insignificant. Such men are swollen 
shut as to much the largest part of their nature 
by the pride of learning. They have in com- 
mon with all men the faculty of faith, but in 
denying it all exercise they ultimately destroy 
the faculty itself, and so of them it comes to be 
written, "Having eyes, they see not." Satan 
will suggest to you that since learning has 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 69 

given you so many rich and noble possessions, 
no possessions can be rich and noble except 
those given by learning. The Christian scholar 
rejoices in all these possessions of learning, but 
claims the right to open all the windows of his 
nature, to feel as well as to see and hear, to be- 
lieve as well as to know. 

Again, it is the tendency of learning to con- 
clude that faith is the blind acceptance of a 
proposition, and so it makes much of "articles 
of faith." Accordingly when these "articles" 
propose problems obscure and unanalyzable by 
the intellect, it feels justified in rejecting them. 
And, in fact, what many men mean in saying 
that they have no faith is that they do not ac- 
cept this or that doctrine. But you should not 
be deceived by this. A man may reject every 
known statement of doctrinal truth and still 
have faith. Our faith stands not in the wisdom 
of men, but in the demonstration of the Spirit 
and in power. Faith asks to be verified by ex- 
perience, not by logic. Don't let learning carry 
you into the wilderness of argument and then 
taunt you to make bread for your soul out of 
stones. It is not that every article of our faith 
can be demonstrated in the forum of logic, but 
because we have felt and seen and handled of 
the Word of Life that we believe and enter into 
rest. 



70 The Good Life. 

Then closely connected with this is the se- 
ductive fallacy that by faith is meant a divine 
meditation, a heavenly rapture, an experience 
of the closet too serene and mystical to be 
brought into the glare of common life, and 
therefore practical men must leave that sort of 
thing to the recluse and take hold of something- 
better fitted to the burdens and strain of the 
life we have to live. But you will not be de- 
ceived by this if you look at Jesus. His faith 
was a life, and this life was and is the light of 
men. Maybe you cannot find a form of the 
syllogism just to fit it, but the blind man's 
creed carries conviction with it nevertheless : 
"One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, 
now I see." So the demonstration of the faith 
of those who follow Jesus spells itself out in 
the radiant symbols of transformed lives, of 
consecrated labors, of undying devotion to 
good deeds, to which this dark, hungry, moan- 
ing world is slowly turning as into a new, im- 
mortal morning. 

Finally, we must warn you that the educated 
man of today is in peril as to his faith, because 
much of the education of today is distinctively, 
if not exclusively, material; not that philos- 
ophy and the arts are not still pursued, but just 
now men are being dazzled by the more bril- 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 71 

liant and spectacular besides the really noble 
and beneficent results of physical science. It 
will do you no harm to give full rein to your 
enthusiasm in these studies if you but remem- 
ber that nature's God is greater than nature, 
and that physical science can build no ladder 
to take you from one to the other. But Satan 
seeks to imprison you in this world of matter, 
to turn the firmament above you into brass and 
drive you to the bitter absurdity of denying 
reality to everything which refuses to be esti- 
mated in terms of matter. And out from the 
laboratory he would drive you into your pro- 
fession, into society, to work and live there by 
the same hard, dead formula of matter. He 
will have you to dedicate your energies to a 
material life, to strive after material rewards, 
to beat down and despise every feeling that 
does not come to material results, and at last 
to defy the immortal consciousness within you 
and blaspheme the infinite God above you by 
declaring that you yourself are but matter and 
your final home is in the dust. 

And will you do this, my dear friends? I 
know you will not do it today. In this home 
circle about our altar, with the incense that the 
memories of these past years waft over you as 
you meet for the last prayer, I know you could 



J2 The Good Life. 

not be induced today to dedicate your culture 
and your enthusiasm to any life that promised 
to rob you of your faith. 

But another Figure is in our midst today — 
on His knees. And I seem to hear, as I have 
heard through all the weeks this message has 
been taking shape in my mind, the words 
breaking like a sigh from lips that move now 
only in prayer : "But I have prayed for thee." 
What means this change from "you" to "thee?" 
I have been warning you all, as He taught me. 
"Satan hath desired to have you" But now I 
turn to hear Him pray for one, "for thee." 
There is no need for the exculpatory question 
to fly in quick succession from one to the other, 
"Lord, is it I ?" He means thee, whoever thou 
art, most secure in the confidence that thou 
canst never fail ; thou, most like generous, im- 
pulsive Peter. The Master will not hide our 
danger from us in any general terms, but spe~ 
cifically, calling each of us by name, He speaks. 
Is He addressing the leader of this class? — 
"Simon, Simon" — the word falls like a wail of 
loving solicitude. He speaks not to those who 
have deliberately chosen to forsake Him, but 
to those in peril, and so there is no wrath nor 
rebuke, but infinite tenderness rather. Nor is 
He the cold, impartial judge, looking on un- 



Perils of the Privileged Life. 73 

moved at the race you are beginning, willing to 
crown you if you win, but careless if you fail. 
These are the words of Him who broke His 
heart over our failures and tasted death that we 
might not fail at last. "Simon, Simon." Will 
you not feel the pathos of this appeal, this 
mother's warning, wet with the tears of in- 
finite tenderness? "Satan hath desired to have 
you." Not today nor here, while thronging 
memories make this place holy and your whole 
life as solemn and awful as a sacrament; not 
today does this wily foe hope to win you to base 
denial ; but as you spring into the activities of 
a new experience, by these and in these Satan 
has determined "to sift you as wheat." He will 
use your learning, your enthusiasm, your trust- 
fulness, every element of your nature that you 
have been privileged to develop; he will use 
them all; he will make you proud of them all 
and give you fullest enjoyment of them all, 
if so he may insidiously shake out the priceless 
kernel of your faith. "Oh, full of all subtlety 
and all mischief, thou enemy of all righteous- 
ness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right 
ways of the Lord?" Canst thou forever be 
permitted to take these aids to faith and make 
men believe they are its better substitutes ? No ! 
That voice of tenderness is not of weakness; 



74 The Good Life. 

those tears of solicitude are not of helplessness. 
It is He who is mighty to save ! It is He who 
by His cross spoiled principalities and powers 
and won the right henceforth to pray for those 
who believe in His name. 

Let us rest in this prayer today. It may be 
some of us will fail ; some of us may be deluded 
into shameful denial of what is so holy to us 
today. If so, let us turn again to this scene. 
In the humiliation and remorse of that defeat 
we shall suddenly feel, when tears will not suf- 
fer us to see, the Lord turning and looking 
upon us. And then we will remember these 
words; we will see this loving figure on His 
knees; we will hear again this tender voice in 
supplication, and even as we go out weeping 
bitterly, the blessed words will follow us, "that 
thy faith fail not." Clinging to these it shall 
not fail. In that blessed moment it shall kindle 
again and hope shall revive and joy unutterable 
shall take the place of heaviness. For the 
prayer prevails. Oh ! it prevails ! And of 
those whom the Father has given Him He 
loses not one. 



IV. 
THE SUPREME KNOWLEDGE 



THE SUPREME KNOWLEDGE* 

Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss for 
the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my 
Lord. — Philip plans 3: 8. 

This is the revised and deliberate judgment 
of a man who went the whole length of affirm- 
ing it even unto death. When the question was 
presented to him for the first time, some thirty 
years before, he had acquired the right to glory 
in many of the things held most dear by his 
age. His birth, his education, his talents, his 
religious zeal and success and honors made it 
possible for him to say with propriety : "If any 
other man thinketh that he hath whereof he 
might trust in the flesh, I more." 

In the height of his success Jesus met him, 
revealed Himself to him and won him. With- 
out hesitation he threw away the gains of a 
lifetime and meekly asked, "Lord, what wilt 
Thou have me to do ?" 

And now he has tested this passionate sub- 
mission in the sober, serious experiences of 



1 
^Preached before the University of West Virginia, 
June 6, 1886. 



78 The Good Life. 

thirty years. "In labors more abundant, in 
stripes above measure, in prisons more fre- 
quent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times 
received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was 
I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I 
suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have 
been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils 
of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine 
own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in 
perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in 
perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren ; 
in weariness andpainfulness,in watchings often, 
in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold 
and nakedness. Besides those things that are 
without, that which cometh upon me daily, the 
care of all the churches." 

And now the end of it all is at hand, for he 
is lying in a Roman dungeon with the sentence 
of death already sounding in his ears. What, 
then, has been the effect of these labors, these 
sufferings, this approaching ignominy upon 
that decision made thirty years ago? Like as 
we linger with strained attention about dying 
saints to catch their final declaration concern- 
ing the faith they have found sufficient for life, 
so our hearts pause in tremulous expectation 
before the closing scene in the unparalleled life 
of this prisoner of the Lord. O Watchman! 



The Supreme Knowledge. 79 

disappearing in the settling mists of the ever- 
lasting sunset, what of the night? There is no 
hesitancy and no abatement of his confidence 
and joy. Clear and strong comes back the 
jubilant reply: "Yea, doubtless, and I count 
all things but loss for the excellency of the 
knowledge of Christ." 

That which interests us particularly in this 
dying confession of the prince of apostles is 
that he speaks in the character of a student. The 
reward which is more than a compensation for 
all he has suffered is knowledge. And thus our 
attention is directed to the fact that in the mani- 
fold relations between Christ and men there is 
a connection through knowledge. We have the 
right to speak of the "science" of Christ, and 
we may find in the pursuit and possession of 
this science a power and a joy to gain which it 
is the highest wisdom to count all other kinds 
of knowledge but loss. 

There seems to be special fitness in empha- 
sizing such a thought in this presence. You, 
my student friends, have caught the inspira- 
tion of knowledge. Your nature is opening 
more and more under the alluring touch of the 
harmonies and mysteries in you and about you. 
The earth is laying bare her treasures to you, 
the skies are bending to whisper their secrets 



8o The Good Life. 

to you, and the world is changing to you, be- 
coming transformed, transfigured even, as you 
live and move and have your being in the realm 
of science. It is my pleasant duty to summon 
you to the fullest expansion of your privilege. 
I do not wish to persuade you to deny or abdi- 
cate any right or power you have to know any- 
thing. Rather would I convince you that you 
may add to your already valuable possessions 
that which is worth more than all of them. 1 
desire to emphasize the thought that the inter- 
ests of this hour are in strict accord with those 
of the year just closed ; that when we greet you 
in the Christian sanctuary we are still in the 
temple of science ; that when we open the Bible 
and call you to its immortal themes we are 
offering you not a divine mystery only, not a 
scheme of belief only, but a science, an exact 
science of the highest and most practical worth. 
We are trying to lead you on from height to 
height in the great University which includes 
all knowledge as its province and which offers 
as its reward nothing less than "the riches both 
of the wisdom and knowledge of God." 

i. Let us first assure ourselves that we are 
not using a figure of speech in thus speaking of 
the relation between Christ and men, but that 
such knowledge is really possible. 



The Supreme Knowledge. 8i 

That native opposition to God in the human 
heart ever crying out to itself like a frightened 
child in the night, 'There is no God/' is con- 
stantly changing the form of its denial. Men 
used to reject God with boasting; now they 
reject Him with a sigh. If God exists, men 
say, He is too great, too far removed from our 
little sphere for our poor faculties to apprehend 
Him. We do not deny, but we cannot assert. 
We can only say, we do not know, we cannot 
know. 

This sounds very unpretentious and sincere, 
but a little reflection will convince us that this 
form of atheism, which is called agnosticism, 
really arrogates to itself unbounded preroga- 
tive. For the agnostic not only assumes that 
he knows man so fully as to assert that there is 
no faculty in him by which God may be ap- 
prehended, but he even assumes a knowledge 
of that very Being he pretends is unknowable, 
and declares that God is limited to the forms 
and methods of human knowledge; that not 
only can we not find Him, but that He cannot 
find us and reveal Himself to us. Agnosticism 
is pure assumption ; daring and captivating it 
may be, but none the less assumption. It can 
have no standing against the positive affirma- 
tion of those who do know, of those who stake 



82 The Good Life. 

all upon the simple statement, "I know whom 
I have believed." Nor has it any better stand- 
ing in the court of reason. If I am able to 
know matter by its contact with that which is 
material in me ; if I know the intellectual by the 
flash of my own intellect, why may I not also 
know Him who is a Spirit by the witness of 
my own spirit ? 

I scan with my telescope the worlds of the 
sky, tell their elements, their motions, their re- 
lations; and I call this science. Why should 
I be forbidden in the name of science from 
listening to the music of these worlds — 

"Forever singing as they shine, 

The hand that made us is divine"? 

Where is the essential difference between mark- 
ing the actions of men, the overthrow of king- 
doms, the progressive steps in civilization, and 
calling this the science of history, and with the 
same diligence reverently to attend to those 
changes, those steps, those workings of human 
activities towards ends higher and broader than 
human wisdom could foresee or control, and 
calling this the science of Providence ? Christ 
calls us what Plato called his followers — "dis- 
ciples," and for the same reason, we are learn- 
ers, we follow on to know perfectly. Why 



The Supreme Knowledge. 83 

should it be thought a thing incredible with you 
that God should be known? Consult reason, 
consult conscience, and, best and surest of all, 
consult experience, and you must be satisfied 
that such knowledge is possible. 

2. The excellence of this science of Christ 
is emphasized by its certainty. 

Students of the present day are well aware 
of the instability of science as we know it. In- 
deed, it is the boast of its disciples that it is 
flexible and must ever wait receptive for new 
knowledge. We know that much of the science 
of today is the refutation of the science of yes- 
terday. "Brother Jasper'"' furnishes amusement 
to the continent for affirming what the greatest 
scientists solemnly taught a few centuries ago. 
And among the highest authorities today text- 
books change, so-called facts change, and must 
change to be consistent with their own princi- 
ples. For they are built upon a foundation of 
uncertainty ; they assume that we do not as yet 
know. Paul was estimating human knowledge 
as we still estimate it when he counted it all loss 
that he might gain the knowledge of Christ. 
He knew something of the science of this 
world. He was skilled in the learning of the 
most learned of his day. But when he came to 
know Christ he found at last what no other 



84 The Good Life. 

knowledge had been able to give him — the rest 
of the soul ; he found certainty. 

It will be helpful perhaps to consider the 
reason for this difference between the knowl- 
edge of Christ and all other knowledge. There 
are three avenues by which we may gain knowl- 
edge of any kind — the senses, the intellect and 
the spirit. All we know we have learned 
through one of these sources. It is the peculiar 
glory of the knowledge of Christ that it comes 
to men through all three of these. 

In response to the weakness and blindness of 
humanity, He who enjoyed the fullness of the 
Father's glory clothed himself with a human 
form that Our senses might take knowledge of 
Him. He spoke to us with a human voice, 
touched our weary, sick, dead bodies with a 
human hand, manifested sympathy for human 
woe in human sighs and tears, and by many 
signs and wonders approved Himself the Lord 
of Glory to eye-witnesses of His majesty. 
"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt 
among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory 
as of the only begotten of the Father, full of 
grace and truth." 

Then for those who could not see, but might 
believe with greater blessing, He impressed 
Himself on the pages of history. Here He 



The Supreme Knowledge. 85 

offers Himself to the intellectual observation 
of the ages. His words, His works, Plis char- 
acter offer to all His own challenge through all 
the generations: "What think ye of. Christ?" 
There is no sphere of the operation of the in- 
tellect but that Christ has filled it with His 
presence. He is the Christ of history, of litera- 
ture, of government, of morals, of aesthetics. 
Everywhere the intellect of man is challenged 
to pay homage to this great master intellect of 
the world. Everywhere He meets us, and if 
we will, He fills us with the bread that cometh 
down from heaven. 

But it was not sufficient that man might see 
and touch Christ, might read and reason of the 
Christ. Man's complete nature must be filled 
with Christ, and in response to that which is 
still lacking in him comes the gracious decla- 
ration: "Behold, I stand at the door and 
knock : if any man hear My voice and open the 
door, I will come in to him, and will sup with 
him and he with Me." Here we meet but one 
Teacher. No other offers to penetrate the soul 
with his doctrine, and what Christ has to tell us 
thus face to face is like no other knowledge in 
its certainty. 

Now, consider the true force of the inference 
to be drawn from these observations. No man 



86 The Good Life. 

is equally developed in all his receptive facul- 
ties, but here is a knowledge that demonstrates 
its universality by meeting every man at that 
point of approach where he is most sensitive to 
knowledge. No man is willing to venture great 
interests on the testimony of one faculty, but 
here is a knowledge that admits of verification 
from three separate sources. We may confirm 
our senses by our reason and both by our ex- 
perience. Whence is this knowledge, which is 
so unlike all others, which has such marvelous 
adaptability and which fits and fills every know- 
ing faculty in man? W^ho could reveal a uni- 
versal teaching but' a universal teacher ? 

3. To stop here in the discussion of this 
theme would be unjust to the subject. We 
want certainty, but we are not thoroughly fur- 
nished when we have attained rest in our 
knowledge. The strongest reason for Paul's 
exultation in the knowledge of Christ is the ex- 
pectation of the effects this knowledge was to 
work in him. 

(1) And first, he expected righteousness 
as the outcome of his knowledge. It is no 
doubt the effect of all knowledge to quicken, 
refine and elevate our nature. Knowledge is 
power in making its possessor a master of his 
own forces, and knowledge is also culture, that 



The Supreme Knowledge. 87 

insensible influence which envelops and goes 
forth from the scholar, giving polish and sym- 
metry to the whole man. 

But, my friends, let us remember that power 
is not righteousness. Power only makes pos- 
sible and actual the disposition of the heart. 
Unsanctified power knows no god but a giant, 
no religion but hero-worship, and no law but 
the right of might. And let us recall the truth, 
from which men seem to be drifting today, that 
culture is not righteousness. We may polish 
the walls of a sepulchre, but that will not make 
it a temple. It is not the tendency of unsancti- 
fied culture to reach the heart. Culture alone 
is satisfied if the voice be gentle, if the bearing 
be refined, although beneath these the fierce 
fires of a corrupt, hard and selfish heart may 
rage. But the knowledge of Christ produces 
righteousness. Not simply correcting man's 
errors and making him think right. Righteous- 
ness is right thinking, but it is more. It pene- 
trates and regulates the will and affections, 
making us feel right and act right. It controls 
conduct, filling human life with whatsoever 
things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and of 
good report. But it is more. Righteousness is 
life. It is the resurrection of the whole man — 
body, soul and spirit — from death to life. It is 



88 The Good Life. 

the everlasting supremacy of the best in us over 
the worst. It is harmony with ourselves and 
with God. All this it is because the knowledge 
of Christ sets before us the Righteous One, and 
we learn its lessons under the influence of His 
blessed example, who brought down righteous- 
ness from heaven to earth to show it to us ac- 
complished in human life. 

(2) Again, we must note that the knowl- 
edge of Christ was to Paul the pledge of im- 
mortality. "That I may know Him and the 
power of His resurrection * * * if by any 
means I might attain unto the resurrection of 
the dead." 

The subject is too vast for passing treatment, 
but it must not be entirely passed over. What 
we can only suggest here is that the apostle's 
expectation is an inference based on experi- 
ence. He knew Christ, and by that knowledge 
he had already been raised from death to new- 
ness of life. So by the tokens of the life he now 
enjoyed he expected to go on to the glories of 
eternal life. 

In some respects the knowledge of Christ 
does not differ from other knowledge. All 
knowledge is life-giving to some degree. Un- 
til our minds open to take in the world about 
us, the relations of things, the causes and sig- 



The Supreme Knowledge. 89 

nificance of things, we have only an animal ex- 
istence. Life comes with knowledge. It is a 
kind of resurrection, bringing us up from mere 
breathing, feeding creatures to be living souls. 
More than this. Knowledge is the measure of 
life. A man may live a hundred years, but if 
this is all he knows of time, and his birthplace 
all he knows of the world, how insignificant is 
his life ! It is knowledge that expands our 
horizon, that intensifies our existence and 
makes us the heirs of all the ages. 

Now, the effect of knowing Christ is like this 
general effect of all knowledge. But because 
all power is given unto Him in heaven and 
earth, the power of His resurrection sweeps us 
out of the range of the limited experience of 
this life into a life as endless as Himself. We 
cannot die until we cease to know, and as He 
lives forever, we shall live also. 

How infinitely does this knowledge rise 
above that which is mere power, mere culture, 
when it becomes for every man righteousness 
and eternal life? It is, as we have tried to 
point out to you, the power to know Him who 
is incomparable, and to know Him in the same 
way in which other science is gained, and to 
know Him in a far more wonderful degree of 
certainty; to assure ourselves of certainty not 



go The Good Life. 

only as we verify other knowledge, by question- 
ing sensation and reason, but by entering into 
the very laboratory of the soul to question faith 
and consciousness, and so gain the irrefutable 
results of experience; to have wrought in us 
the blessed effects of this knowledge, to walk 
with Him who is righteous, to experience the 
awakening energies of new life working in us 
and lifting us to the vision of the glories of a 
new life, a day without a sunset, a sky without a 
horizon, the radiant, everlasting zenith. "This 
is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God 
and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." 



IRREDUCIBLE RELIGION 



IRREDUCIBLE RELIGION* 

What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do 
justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
thy God?— Micah 6: 8. 

This is an age of analysis, of definition, of 
criticism. We seem to regard nothing as too 
sacred for investigation or too perfect for im- 
provement. The terrors of nonconformity have 
gone forever, and he of the established order is 
rather on the defensive. 

It is not strange that religion should be 
brought into question as men are formulating 
their new declaration of independence. Few of 
us regret, I presume, that the Inquisition passed 
out before we came on the stage, and that we 
never expect to see a man punished for not be- 
lieving what he does not want to believe. We 
are reconciled to the thought that nothing that 
is false or even incidental in religion can be 
kept alive by any sort of force, and that nothing 
that is true and essential can ever be destroyed. 

Still, even for those of us who view with 



*Preached before the University of Virginia, Octo- 
ber 29, 1899. 



94 The Good Life. 

complacency the fierce earnestness of the ana- 
lytic spirit of the times, the question will arise, 
What is religion — the final religion — to be re- 
duced to ? What are we to have left when the 
critics have stripped away the unessentials ? 
Will there be any core found at last which can- 
not be peeled further, but opposes its unyield- 
ing coherence to all attempts at analysis? In 
other words, would it not be timely, if it were 
possible, to describe the irreducible religion? 

Certainly a great change is taking place in 
the attitude of men toward religion, and much 
that used to be regarded as essential is regarded 
now with indifference. Denominational dis- 
tinctions have very slight hold upon the masses 
of men, and the cry for a united church is not 
half so strong nor so significant as that re- 
sponse which comes from the multitude that it 
makes no difference, since any will do. Pecu- 
liar forms of worship which have been de- 
fended in battle and secured as inestimable 
privileges no longer appeal to anything deeper 
in us than taste and use. There are still num- 
bers of religious creeds, but it is impossible to 
make the multitude fight over them any longer. 
And, in fact, the multitude does not know -what 
its creed is, having long ago left it in the keep- 
ing of specialists. The idea of a standard book 



Irreducible Religion. 95 

is having less practical force in the guidance of 
men's minds than ever before. Men are learn- 
ing to speak confidently of what is not inspired 
in the Bible and even of what is false. They 
take what they please, and leave the rest to 
traditionalists. The pulpit is no longer su- 
preme as the instructor of conscience. It is 
perhaps true that the Sunday newspaper 
reaches more people than the pulpit does, and 
its influence over its audience is not less ef- 
fective. What is becoming, or, rather, what 
has become, of our religious day? Places of 
business close as usual, and places of worship 
open as usual. But where is the Sunday our 
fathers knew ? 

I do not name these things as sympathizing 
with them or as despairing of our future, but 
to note the fact that the minds of many men 
are changing in regard to what are essential 
religious matters. I want to meet a query 
which I feel sure young people of the present 
day are seriously meditating, and I have 
thrown these things into bold relief to prepare 
an answer to it. That query is, What is essen- 
tial to religion? Is one thing as religious as 
another, or are there some things unchanged 
through all change, unconditional, imperative, 
ultimate, irreducible to anything simpler? In 



g6 The Good Life. 

undertaking a brief answer to so large a ques- 
tion it will clear our way a little if we may 
agree upon two assumptions : 

1. I will ask those who are in sympathy 
with this critical development to grant me that, 
since there has always been some sort of reli- 
gion among men everywhere, we may reason- 
ably refuse to believe that men will ever be 
without any religion anywhere. This will mean 
that whatever the present process of elimina- 
tion may result in, it will certainly not be a de- 
velopment into no religion at all. It would be 
as reasonable to believe that something came 
from nothing as to helieve that something can 
pass into nothing. Religion of some sort, there- 
fore, we may assume there will always be. 

2. And, for my part, I am willing to grant 
that we will keep on eliminating and reducing 
until we reach a religion which cannot be re- 
duced further both as to its requirements and 
its authority. And the irreducible religion, 
when we reach it, will be found to rest not on 
any command or law or surroundings external 
to man himself, either on earth or in heaven, 
but solely on man's own nature. 

To those who think this assumption asks too 
much and really reduces us to natural religion, 
I reply that natural religion, as commonly un- 



Irreducible Religion. 97 

derstood, refers to that religion which men work 
out for themselves without supernatural aid. 
This assumption does not grant that, does not, 
in fact, deny revelation, but simply admits that 
irreducible religion, however reached, will be 
finally based on man's nature. And to those 
who fear, further, that such an assumption 
undermines the authority of the Bible, I reply 
that the true conception of the Bible does not 
hold it to be an arbitrary statement or code, 
but a statement of facts. And it gets all its 
authority, not from the character of him who 
makes the statements, but from the character 
of the statements it makes. The Bible refers 
us to the facts, and is found true to the facts. 
This is the reason we yield to its authority. 

No man could be religious in the true sense 
because he was commanded to be so, nor for 
the attainment of an end external to his own 
nature. Men have said they would be willing 
to be damned for the glory of God, but this is 
not religion ; it is moral suicide. The only au- 
thority man can sincerely acknowledge must 
make its final appeal to his own nature. It 
must say, you ought to do so and so, because 
you are so and so. "Nothing is at last sacred," 
says Emerson, "but the integrity of your own 
mind. ,, 



98 The Good Life. 

Now, with these two assumptions I think we 
may press our way through a discussion of this 
text as setting forth at the same time a sum- 
mary of the religion of the Bible and the irre- 
ducible religion of human nature. We shall 
see, I trust, upon a fair examination of the 
text, that neither the Bible nor systems of 
faith and practice founded on the Bible make 
any larger claim or reach any higher than the 
things here required; and, on the other hand, 
that nothing less than these can satisfy the re- 
quirements of man's own nature when that 
nature is comprehensively studied. Let us ad- 
dress ourselves, then, to such an examination 
of the matter in the light of this text, the Bible 
and human nature, as our time will permit. 

I. And we observe, first, what is incidental, 
but must be more than an accident, that this 
religion outlined in the text is threefold in its 
character. It is a fact that man is a trinity 
also. He is a body, a soul and a spirit. If this 
text declares what man ought to do, what he 
ought to feel and with whom he ought to com- 
mune in spirit, it is not wholly insignificant that 
it is addressed to beings whose nature compels 
them to act, to feel and to hold spiritual com- 
munion. If there is nothing else in the whole 
Bible to be added to religion but this perfect 



Irreducible Religion. 99 

trinity of requirements, it is equally certain 
that anything less would fail to provide for the 
entire nature of man, and anything additional 
would find no capacity in man to appeal to. 
Individual men differ greatly in gifts and ac- 
quirements, and so it comes to pass that one 
man is a poet, another a mechanic and an- 
other a hewer of wood and drawer of water. 
But man — universal man — does not vary from 
this triune capacity indicated in the text. Every 
man, whatever his station or his education or 
his gifts, every man can act and feel and com- 
mune. 

This much, then, may be regarded as sug- 
gestive, as far as it goes, that the requirements 
of the text as to number and general character 
fit exactly the nature and capacity of universal 
man. 

2. Coming to particulars, we notice, first, 
what we may call the law of conduct, "to do 
justly." Conduct, as we know, is simply our 
doing, the behavior of ourselves in the various 
relations of life; not what we make with our 
hands alone, or devise with our brain, or say 
with our lips, but the entire sum of our activ- 
ity. And the law of conduct will be the rule 
by which we are guided in our doing, or rather 
that by which we should be guided. 



LOFC. 



ioo The Good Life. 

No one can imagine that there is no law of 
conduct, that we can do as we please about 
anything. Sometimes we can choose to do or 
not to do, but we cannot choose to do anything 
without any respect to the law of doing. Some 
things refuse to be done at all except in con- 
formity with their law, and others may be done, 
although not successfully, by some other law 
than their own, but however and whatever we 
do we must follow some law. 

Now, the law of conduct prescribed by re- 
ligion is, "do justly," or, as it is more fully ex- 
plained in another place, "do all to the glory of 
God," which comes to precisely the same thing, 
for to do things to the glory of God is to do 
them to the glory of Him who made all things, 
or according to His plan, or, in brief, to do 
them right. But this law of conduct is noth- 
ing but the outward expression of every man's 
nature. It is written as plainly in us as it is 
written in our Bibles. No man needs a reve- 
lation to tell him "to do justly." None of us 
can remember a time when we did not know 
this, and the voice of the preacher urging this 
upon us is a voice we recognize as one we have 
heard many times before. It is as impossible 
to live in the social and moral world without 
regarding this law as it is to live in the physical 



Irreducible Religion. ioi 

world without regarding the physical law of 
Tightness. Not to do justly means anarchy 
and impossible social conditions. It is true so- 
ciety continues notwithstanding much injus- 
tice, but it does so because, as it is, justice is 
the standard, the ideal, and the majority fol- 
low it. But only suppose it were otherwise, 
and injustice were the standard which men 
were urged to comply with ; man could not live 
with man under such conditions. Such a so- 
ciety would destroy itself. 

This is the voice of nature in us. But can 
this be an adequate expression of what the re- 
ligion of the Bible requires? Is not this the 
heresy of salvation by works ? I am not care- 
ful to answer in this matter, for it seems to me 
we have swung so far in the direction of anti- 
nomianism in these latter days that a little of 
the opposite heresy even would be a salutary 
corrective. I am sure that no more hurtful 
heresy was ever abroad than that which inti- 
mates to men that religion is not first of all 
religious doing. God's great business with us 
in the Bible is not about mysterious doctrines 
and critical difficulties over ancient manuscripts 
and questions over pulpit millinery and the 
forms in which we express our praise; it is 
about life, about our way of doing. It interro- 



102 The Good Life. 

gates us every moment as to what we are doing 
and why we are doing it. It is about our obli- 
gations as citizens, about the forms of govern- 
ment we tolerate and the public officials we 
approve. It examines us touching our use of 
money and position and personal gifts. It an- 
ticipates by description a judgment in which 
no mention is made of what we believed, but 
the whole case is decided on what we have done 
or failed to do. It rises to its highest fervor 
not in eulogy of a creed or a ritual, but in direct 
appeal to "put away the evil of your doings 
from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn 
to do well." 

Alas ! that in spite of this clear testimony of 
our nature and of the Bible we should be so 
slow to apprehend the truth! That all that 
seems dreamy and vague and impracticable; 
all that seems postponed to another life, and 
about which we are uncertain if it will ever be 
realized ; all that men have no real zest for and 
feel no real need of — that such things should 
fill up the full measure of the only conception 
so many men have of religion ! Oh, my friends, 
believe me, you will never learn such a defini- 
tion from the Bible no more than from your 
own nature. No criticism can ever eliminate 
from the Bible the straight, terse, insistent note 



Irreducible Religion. 103 

woven through every strain of it that religion 
is first of all a just life; a life among men and 
for men; a life of just purposes and just 
achievements; a life good enough for heaven, 
but not too good for earth. 

If the time shall come to any of you when it 
seems hard for you to grasp the intricacies of 
religious discussion, and the mysteries of faith 
seem inaccessible to you, and you feel that you 
get no furtherance from the vast range of Bib- 
lical criticism, do not, I beseech you, despair of 
attaining religion. One thing at least may be 
forever sure. Do right, and it is impossible for 
you to be miserable here or hereafter. Settle 
yourself on this and you shall find it a rock 
beneath you. Be honest, be true, be pure, be 
just, and you shall stand four-square to every 
wind that blows. I will not undertake to tell 
you what religious name you will bear, but I 
know you will have God for your father and 
Jesus Christ for your brother. You will know 
all good men for your fellows, and you may at 
least call yours the irreducible religion. 

3. The text calls attention next to the law 
of feeling, and declares that God requires us 
"to love mercy." And it means by this, doubt- 
less, to say that more than mere doing is re- 
quired of man, because he is a being capable 



104 The Good Life. 

of more. He can feel, and for this capacity 
religion has also a law. 

That there is this capacity in us all none will 
deny. We may not be able to get at it so di- 
rectly, but the proofs of its existence, seen in 
its effects, are with us all the time. Indeed, we 
may go further, and say that the worth of 
many of our actions depends more upon the 
presence or absence of the appropriate feeling 
than upon the action itself. A man may even 
do justly in such a way as to miss commenda- 
tion, because it is evident that he has, as we 
say, no heart in it. But the law requires more 
than feeling; it requires a feeling of love. It 
sets forth this as the standard of all feeling, 
just as it sets forth justice as the standard of 
all conduct. 

Let us see what our nature answers to this. 
It tells us that to feel wrong may change the 
whole character of an action. The very same 
action, say the thrusting into a human body of 
a sharp knife, may be either a crime or a bless- 
ing according as the intention may be that of 
the assassin or the surgeon. It tells us that 
there is no surer judge of character than the 
feelings, and that back of the spoken word or 
the overt act lurks the feeling that must inevit- 



Irreducible Religion. 105 

ably stamp it not for what it looks to be, but 
for what it was intended to be. 

And the standard feeling, the feeling which 
is uppermost in the morning of life before con- 
tact with the world has crusted it over, and 
uppermost in the evening of life when a survey 
of all of life enables us to estimate matters in 
their due proportion, the standard feeling is 
"to love mercy." No Bible, however verified, 
could make us adore a God who delighted in 
cruelty. No churchly authority could make us 
approve a system which persuaded us that to 
hurt men, to terrify them with threats, to stain 
the beautiful earth with their blood or insult 
the majesty of the serene stars with groans 
wrenched from them by our oppression was 
doing God service and illustrating the religion 
that deserved to be called divine. No! Our 
nature in its highest tone revolts from cruelty. 
We see clearly enough that we were made to 
feel kindly to one another, to live together in 
the concord of brotherly affection, "to love 
mercy." 

And is it not significant that when we need 
the right words to express these basal facts of 
our nature we are forced to seek the most ap- 
propriate language from the Bible? What is 
the religion of the Bible but "to love mercy?" 



106 The Good Life. 

Humanitarians are offended at the cross, and 
cry out against a religion of blood. But they 
know not what they say. The religion of the 
Bible does not shed blood, and the cross is not 
the cruelty of Christ. It is the cruelty of His 
enemies, and the blood of the Bible is the blood 
of the victims of those who hate the Bible. The 
Lamb of God takes away the cruelty of the 
world, though it absorbs it in its own blood. 
And what our nature was whispering to us in 
faint accents reverberates from Calvary with 
a significance and power not to be resisted 
that "to love mercy" is to be truest to ourselves 
and most like God. 

It is not to be resisted. Look abroad for 
the signals everywhere springing up in the path 
of the glorious Gospel of the Son of God; 
the habitations of cruelty giving way to asy- 
lums, hospitals, colleges; a new name being 
written on our rolls of honor, the name of the 
Prince of Peace; arbitration instead of war, 
education instead of punishment; the loving 
heart of man throbbing sympathy with the op- 
pressed in far-off lands, and kindling into in- 
dignation against cruelty even towards the 
brute creation; a vast wave of love pulsing 
throughout the whole range of human inter- 
course. This, my friends, is the religion of the 



Irreducible Religion. 107 

Bible; this is the irreducible religion. God re- 
quires it and man approves it, "to love mercy." 
4. And, finally, we are told in the text of a 
third requirement of religion, "to walk humbly 
with thy God." By this is meant, I think, that 
the religion of the Bible commands us to do 
more than act, more than feel ; it lays on us a 
law of communion. It requires us to cultivate 
those thoughts and dispositions in us which 
lead us through the world of action and the 
world of feeling to realize a world unseen, to 
know God in His world, to walk with Him by 
faith, to learn His secret and to commune with 
the Spirit that makes all right-doing and right- 
feeling possible. It forbids us to leave any of 
this life's duties undone, but it warns us by 
reminding us continually that our citizenship 
is in heaven. It exposes the hypocrisy of pre- 
tending to have the right feeling toward God 
while exhibiting the wrong feeling toward our 
brother, but it also threatens us that "he that 
loveth father or mother, sister or brother, 
houses or lands more than Me is not worthy 
of Me." It declares that we are children of 
eternity, heirs of immortality, destined for an- 
gelic comradeship and the spirits of just men 
made perfect. Hence that it is nothing less 
than disloyalty to our parentage to lay hold on 



108 The Good Life. 

the things of this world in forgetfulness of the 
world to which we really belong. 

Let us consult our nature with reference to 
this requirement and see if it is written there 
as imperatively as we know it to be written in 
the Bible. 

I think it cannot have escaped even the least 
thoughtful that there is in us all a faculty, a 
capacity, ever active and ever occupied not with 
things, but with the meaning of things. I have 
already hinted at one manifestation of this fac- 
ulty in the way it deals with our actions. But 
we may say with reference to our whole ac- 
tivity that the meaning, the significance, far 
surpasses in worth the actual performance. 
This hidden nature demands recognition for 
what was meant to be done as well as for what 
was done. And, then, in our most restless and, 
to all appearances, our most worldly moments, 
in the absorbing attention we give to labor and 
its rewards, we may discover the struggle of 
this earnest spirit within us to reach an ideal. 
Even sordid ambition often is a clumsy effort 
of the spirit to reveal its striving after perfec- 
tion. Its vision is sadly blurred, its movement 
is painfully grotesque, but, after all, this is its 
way of trying to walk with its God. I appeal 
to you all, have you ever been completely satis- 



Irreducible Religion. 109 

fied with food simply, and shelter and other 
carnal gratifications ? I recall to you those mo- 
ments when you despised your surroundings, 
despised yourself for not despising your sur- 
roundings more, and felt your spirit torn with 
the struggle to get away from these and walk 
in a purer air, a serener light. And was not 
this God's voice in the soul inviting and com- 
manding us to walk with Him? We are like 
Adam in the Garden. Because we have sinned 
we hide ourselves in the vanities of the world ; 
we set up barriers of intellect, of pride, of sen- 
sualism. But when the sun goes down and we 
hear His voice calling to us in the deep quiet 
of solitude, we cannot but respond. We are 
afraid and know our nakedness, but we must 
come out even thus and walk with God. There 
is no life so humble or so busy or so sensual 
but that intimations come to it of a Presence 
surrounding and ennobling it. 

When sleep will not come to the wearied 
body, when the mind will no longer respond 
to the demands upon it, in the midst of the 
whirl of life a hand has laid hold of the wheel 
and stayed its course and a voice has broken up 
the silence with tones not to be disobeyed, 
"Come out and walk with God !" And we must 
forsake our bed, we must leave our task, we 



no The Good Life. 

must forget our surroundings and drop all dis- 
guises and stand silent and submissive to follow 
Him who has made us for Himself. 

But, beloved, there is more than this. We 
know, and not because it is in the Bible, but 
because it is written on the tables of the heart, 
we know there is no peace save in walking with 
God. The meaning of life is often sadly mis- 
interpreted, its satisfactions are wofully mis- 
apprehended, when men are being driven 
through the days and nights of anxious striv- 
ing and wearying care. But we all come back 
to it at last. Not here, not thus, filled to the 
brim though the goblet of pleasure may be, 
not thus is peace obtained. 

But, oh, to get hold of a hand stretched out 
to us from the eternal life, to walk, if only for 
a moment, in the light that resolves all doubts 
and glorifies all living, to find Him for whom 
my soul longeth ! This, this, is life eternal, to 
know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent ! 

And so we come at last to know our own 
emptiness and poverty and shame. We give 
the spirit play at last. We come at last to our- 
selves, and no words can we utter but these: 
"I will arise and go to my Father. ,, 

And now, my friends, inadequate as I feel 
my treatment to be, I trust I have made you 



Irreducible Religion. hi 

understand at least my thought — that there is 
nothing great in this world, nothing honorable, 
nothing wise, but only this, "to do justly, to 
love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God." 
This is religion, the supreme, the irreducible 
religion. Yes, this, and not the philosophy of 
men nor the criticism of men — this is life eter- 
nal, life supreme. How simple it all is ! And 
if not easy to keep to or to accomplish, yet how 
easy to understand ! how grand, how sublime 
when it is done ! May God keep you to it for- 
ever! I am not afraid, but I am solicitous. 
Students are so often deceived by sounding 
words, and especially by words they do not 
understand. But ye, beloved, keep to the sim- 
plicity that is in Christ. "It is not in heaven 
that thou shouldest say, Who will go up for us 
to heaven and bring it unto us, that we may 
hear it and do it ? Neither is it beyond the sea 
that thou shouldest say, Who will go over the 
sea for us and bring it unto us, that we may 
hear it and do it? But the word is very nigh 
unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart that 
thou mayest do it." If men have made of re- 
ligion a mystery or an abstruse science ; if they 
have hedged it about with hard conditions, or 
made it seem an endless discussion about names 
and definitions ; if they have lifted it out of the 



ii2 The Good Life. 

range of common life into transcendentalism 
and ecstasy, go not after them. The Kingdom 
of God is within you. God and our own na- 
tures witness together that it is simply "to do 
justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with 
thy God." Oh, hold fast to this ! If men would 
rob you by depreciating this and tempt you to 
utter skepticism, listen to the voice of God in 
your soul. Keep on doing justly, keep on lov- 
ing mercy, give the spirit time to look forth 
from its watch tower; and presently when the 
cool of the day shall come you shall hear the 
voice of the Lord God walking in the midst of 
the garden, and you shall not be afraid. In 
that supreme moment no thought of your 
nakedness shall terrify you. But with open 
face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the 
Lord, you shall be changed into the same image 
from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the 
Lord. 



VI. 

PATRIOTISM 



PATRIOTISM 

And when he drew nigh, he saw the city and wept 
over it, saying, If thou hadst known in this day, even 
thou, the things which belong unto peace ! but now 
they are hid from thine eyes. — Luke 19: 41 ', 42. 

The question has been asked whether Jesus 
was a patriot, whether, as he denied Himself 
all the endearments of the home life, He was 
not also too great to experience a genuine patri- 
otism or love of a particular country. He has 
reaffirmed the solemn duty of honor to parents ; 
He has lifted to a higher meaning the sanctity 
of the marriage relation. But His specific 
teaching nowhere enforces the duty of loving 
one's country. This view is short-sighted. No 
one who reads the passage we have quoted as 
a text, or who recalls that other passage of 
pathetic lamentation, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 
which killeth the prophets and stoneth them 
that are sent unto thee ! how often would I have 
gathered thy children together, even as a hen 
gathereth her chickens under her wings, and 
ye would not !" — no one can think of these ex- 
pressions and feel any doubt of the deep and 
constant love of Jesus for His country. Indeed, 



n6 The Good Life. 

so far from accepting the question as a matter 
to be established, I feel justified in refusing to 
tarry here, and I shall go directly to the as- 
sumption that Jesus is the ideal patriot from 
whom we are to learn what is the true attitude 
of every man to his country. 

i. The circumstances of this exclamation 
teach us that true patriotism does not spring 
from a pessimistic view of public affairs. Jesus 
was never a,pessimist, and surely never had He 
less occasion for discouragement as to His own 
mission than at the time of this incident. The 
time was Palm Sunday. A long season of ob- 
scurity, misunderstanding on the part of His 
followers and contempt and opposition on the 
part of His enemies seems all at once to have 
closed. Under surroundings the most modest 
and unassuming the loyalty and fervid enthu- 
siasm of the populace broke out without pre- 
meditation to give Jesus for the first time a 
royal recognition and salutation as the blessed 
of the Lord. His enemies were confounded 
and silenced. They could see no hope in fur- 
ther opposition, and in despair confessed "the 
world has gone after Him." With palm 
branches, with shouts of "hosanna," in their 
enthusiasm casting their garments before Him, 
the multitude at last recognize and hail Him 



Patriotism. 117 

in the name of the Lord. And this is the hour 
and the occasion of Jesus' lament. The cir- 
cumstances, therefore, remove us entirely from 
the possibility of attributing the expression of 
Jesus to discouragement or pessimism. 

We are entitled to infer broadly from this 
incident that the true patriot is never a pes- 
simist. It is the more necessary to emphasize 
this point in view of the fact that much of what 
we are required to recognize in our own time 
as patriotism is nothing but the exaggerated 
and hopeless complainings of those who have 
lost faith in their country. I do not refer here 
to that large class of so-called patriots who 
love their country for the offices and who be- 
wail the fate of the country when an election 
goes contrary to their wishes. The American 
people have a saving sense of humor, and do 
not take these persons seriously. The cure for 
their pessimism is easy to come at. But there 
are many persons who are not moved by self- 
ishness, who do not want office, and who are 
yet continually prophesying the most dreadful 
future for the country. They can hear a knell 
in an act of Congress; they can see the sword 
of destruction in a President's proclamation; 
the newspapers will ruin the country; corrup- 
tion is eating out the life of our greatness; 



n8 The Good Life. 

riches will destroy us as Rome was destroyed ; 
poverty will bring us to anarchy ; bribery is pre- 
paring the way for a despotism. And then 
there is added to all this the pessimism of pul- 
pit patriots, who cry aloud and spare not. The 
whole decalogue is insulted and trampled by 
our modern civilization, we are told. Religious 
conventions arraign a whole people for the 
crime of intemperance, the crime of adultery, 
the crime of Sabbath desecration. And a 
stranger coming suddenly among us would 
wonder why the multitude of righteous proph- 
ets suffer the unrighteous, who must surely be 
a minority, to live. ' 

I do not assail the motives of such persons. 
I confess that, alas ! there is ground for anxious 
solicitude in many directions. But I do ques- 
tion most seriously whether this habitual tone 
of despondent criticism is calculated to work 
the results it desires ; whether, in fact, when it 
is not entirely ignored, it does not rather retard 
the progress of the nation. When Rome met 
the disastrous defeat at Cannae through the 
stupid generalship of Varro, and Hannibal with 
his victorious legions was hourly expected at 
the gates, the Senate went out to meet Varro 
returning to explain his defeat, and presented 
to him the thanks of Rome "for that he had 



Patriotism. 119 

not despaired of the republic." We need 
something of this sublime heroism of hope in 
our leaders of today. We need to moderate the 
transports of the critical spirit in the electorate. 
Free speech ought not to mean indiscriminate 
and unreasonable scolding. We ought to re- 
spect our institutions; we ought to honor our 
public men; we ought not to despair of the 
republic. And I am moved to emphasize this 
point especially because I am addressing those 
who catch the tone of public feeling long be- 
fore they experience it. College men and 
women are our most intelligent observers, but, 
unfortunately, they frequently go into public 
life with little experience of what it really is, 
while their whole feeling about public life has 
learned to express itself by imitation, and hence 
is too often not genuine. Wholesale condemna- 
tion of public men in the highest station and 
unsparing criticism of measures not well un- 
derstood have thus come to be recognized as the 
sign of academic statesmen whose influence 
upon public affairs is next to nothing. And 
this is so because such patriots are hypercriti- 
cal, which word and thing is too apt to be con- 
fused in the popular mind with hypocritical. 

2. The patriotism of Jesus will teach us in 
the next place that its true source is sympathy. 



120 The Good Life. 

The Man of Sorrows bore the weight of the 
world's grief and sin, and it is recorded of Him 
but once that He rejoiced in spirit. He saw as 
none of us can see all the weakness and wrong 
and cruelty in the human heart. He knew the 
whole future, and the dreadful catastrophe of 
iniquity was vividly before Him in minutest de- 
tail. But His attitude towards it all was not 
disgust nor malevolence, but exquisite sym- 
pathy. Twice it is said of Him, He wept. 
Once as a mourner He dropped silent tears at 
the grave of a friend, weeping with those who 
wept. Again, amid the plaudits of the multi- 
tude, He wept aloud — for the word is not the 
same — in convulsive sobs, bewailing the obsti- 
nate resistance of His countrymen to light and 
peace. This is a very different thing from 
pessimism. Pessimism is largely selfish; it is 
impatience at the defeat of one's own views, 
but, at any rate, it is never sympathy. Jesus 
wept over Jerusalem, but His tears were tears 
of sympathy. And it is impossible for the true 
patriot to lose sympathy with his fatherland. 
Patriotism is not merely an opinion ; it is more 
than a sentiment — it is affection. We may 
think our country great, we may feel proud of 
our country and express lofty sentiments of 
duty and loyalty, but before we can touch the 



Patriotism. 121 

secret of patriotism we must get below these 
and sound the great deep of love. And the 
man who loves his country in no wise differs, 
except in the object of his affections, from the 
man who loves his father and mother or his 
wife and children. If his country is great, he 
will have exalted opinions and noble senti- 
ments ; but great or not, whatever his opinions, 
his patriotism is the same. It is not founded 
on his opinions. He does not love his country 
because it is great, no more than he loves his 
parents because they are rich, but because it is 
his country. To such a man there will come 
moments of profound grief. He will have to 
see unrighteous laws enacted, iniquitous trea- 
ties made, honest and straightforward methods 
set aside, foolish and false policies given a tem- 
porary triumph. He may have to endure see- 
ing his country hurried into ruinous courses 
by the mad enthusiasm of the hour. And at 
such times, if he has nothing but opinion and 
sentiment to guide him, he will not be able to 
stultify himself, to cheat his conscience, to dis- 
honor his manhood, and so he must let his 
country go and walk whither God will lead 
him. But the patriot has another resource. He 
can say, "My country, right or wrong," not in 
the immoral sense of supporting a wrong 



122 The Good Life. 

cause or condoning a national crime, not in the 
sense of changing the eternal principles of right 
to the weathervane of public sentiment, but 
my country, to support when right, and when 
wrong still to love, to weep over, and to ad- 
monish and to bring back to paths of honesty 
and justice. For it must not be supposed that 
sympathy means agreement in opinion. True 
sympathy is based on affection, or rather is 
affection, with which our opinions have little 
to do. The idea that we must think as the 
majority think or be counted lacking in patriot- 
ism is pernicious. We hear at the present day 
extravagant praise given to the policy of our 
distinguished leaders, who keep, as they say, 
their ear to the ground to hear the march of 
public opinion. I do not call this sympathy. 
If it were not praised by such exalted authority 
I should call it demagogism. But I think it is 
a perversion of patriotism to insist that the 
patriot shall step to the measure of the ma- 
jority. Socrates declared that God had fast- 
ened him as a gadfly upon the State to spur it 
on to noble action. Jesus said : "I am come to 
send fire on the earth." Both of these patriots 
paid the penalty of such views of patriotism, 
but the world has judged their judges. They 
refused to keep their ear to the ground. They 



Patriotism. 123 

lifted themselves rather to the clear stars that 
they might catch the message of infinite wis- 
dom, and, having heard, they thought they 
ought to obey God rather than man. This is 
patriotism: to think, not what the majority 
think, but what the majority ought to think, 
and to love whatever we think. Such are the 
demands of patriotism, and to some of you this 
solemn duty will come if you are faithful to 
your high office, and the test of your patriotism 
in that supreme hour will be your success in 
doing this without rancor and without disgust, 
that while you keep your judgment and your 
conscience clear from the madding crowd, en- 
swathed in the light that sweeps through the 
eternal spaces, you also keep your heart close 
to your brother-men, subdued and chastened 
by a sympathy that no contumely or indiffer- 
ence can quench ; no man's man, but God's, and 
every man's brother and friend. Thus will you 
be, as Milton says, "brave men and worthy 
patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages." 

3. We are taught also by the consideration 
of this ideal patriot that the true aim and con- 
suming ambition of patriotism is peace. Here 
we have need for discrimination and careful 
statement, for I am sensible that good men are 
not agreed upon this point. At least while all 



124 The Good Life. 

would agree that peace is the final end of all 
patriots, it is very generally supposed that 
peace may often be unattainable, sometimes un- 
desirable, and generally possible only as the 
result of methods and instruments that are 
seemingly the contradiction of peace. I do not 
intend to traverse the question here as to the 
righteousness or the necessity of war. I must 
adhere to my design of simply pointing out the 
characteristics of the patriotism of Jesus and 
of insisting that this is the ideal for all men. 

To the Jew peace meant prosperity. He ex- 
pressed both ideas by the same word. He com- 
bined, as perhaps no other ever has combined, 
the religious and the national idea of prosper- 
ity. To have full barns and deserted altars was 
not a half-way prosperity. It was the most 
dreadful disaster. Dives was more wretched 
in hell because he had fared sumptuously every 
day on earth. We are not so ultra perhaps in our 
views, and some of us act as if we believed that 
the man who commands material success might 
afford to ignore the blessedness of a future life, 
either because he can buy it with what he has 
or because he can dispense with it altogether. 
But we have not got that far as a nation yet. 
Even those who pay least attention to the de- 
mands of the spiritual world in their individual 



Patriotism. 125 

life will insist that national prosperity is not 
only a matter of empire and wealth. They will 
agree with Macaulay that "English valor and 
English intelligence have done less to extend 
and to preserve its Oriental empire than Eng- 
lish veracity." In the long circle of national 
existence it is certainly true that no question 
is settled until it is settled right. And not only 
morals must have a place, but God's sover- 
eignty, His efficient and inevitable control is 
recognized as a necessity to national prosperity. 
The man who forgets God and trusts in his 
own arm for success in his individual affairs is 
awed at the tremendous thought of a nation's 
weal, and lifts his heart reverently to the only 
source of national strength and prosperity. We 
have had instances in our own country of men 
who made no personal profession of religion 
exalted to the Presidency. But no President 
has ever assumed his great office without a 
voluntary and profound appeal to God for di- 
rection and support. However empty his own 
life might be of thoughts of God, he dared not 
walk alone in the high places of the nation's 
responsibilities. 

National peace, then, means peace with God, 
being at one with Him in purpose and plan. 
And national prosperity means peace. He, 



126 The Good Life. 

therefore, who seeks the nation's prosperity 
must know and pursue the plan and purpose 
of God. Where shall he find these? Some 
hear God's call in the war trumpet; others see 
Him beckoning in the march of empire ; others 
discern His purpose in the progress of science 
and in the development of commerce. Who 
shall decide ? Perhaps it is to be found in none 
of these ; perhaps in them all. We are too cir- 
cumscribed and ignorant to take in the com- 
prehensive purpose of God. And when we talk 
of national tendencies or national destiny we 
are using words with inadequate notions. But 
we do know what peace is, and we know how 
certain is the fate of the nation that is blind to 
the things that belong to peace. It is possible 
for a nation to pursue peace through the hor- 
rible clangor of war. It is possible to add peace 
by the acquisition of territory, to buy it with 
gold, to discover it with science. Peace waits 
at so many gates and presses itself upon us in 
so many forms that it is hard to say through 
what way we may not arrive at it. The blind- 
ness of a nation lies not in forsaking one way 
and choosing another to reach this supreme 
goal. It is when a nation no longer desires 
peace and refuses to pursue it through any 
road ; when it shuts itself up to the lust of em- 



Patriotism. 127 

pire, or the glory of battle, or the pride of 
learning, or the sordid greed of trade; when 
these things, and not peace, become its highest 
inspiration — this is its damning guilt and ir- 
remediable blindness. Jerusalem — city of 
peace by name — Jerusalem, the capital of the 
Prince of Peace ; the city whose policy and des- 
tiny found all their meaning in spreading 
abroad that peace through the world — Jerusa- 
lem became so engrossed in its preparations for 
the Prince of Peace that when He came it 
would not turn away from the tinsel and pa- 
rade, and its Prince was hid from its eyes. 

Oh, patriots, young and old, let us beware 
lest a like fate overtake us ! This splendid re- 
public is not too great to perish. Its vigor, its 
liberty, its resources are all sublime if they 
move us on to peace, if they open men's eyes 
and thrill men's hearts to the hope of peace. 
But if we violate peace ; if, under the inspira- 
tion of liberty or humanity, we let slip the dogs 
of war and then become so infatuated with the 
glory of battle that we cry contemptuously, 
"There is no peace ;" if we sell all we have of 
order and quietness as a people and then buy 
only the strain and uneasiness and sordidness 
of wealth instead of peace ; if we despise peace, 
or if we forget it, or if we do not ardently seek 



128 The Good Life. 

it above every ambition and beyond every joy 
as the sure token of the presence of our Lord 
and King, oh let us beware of the fate of Jeru- 
salem! Let us quiet the clamor about us to 
hear the sobs of that patriot Prince who la- 
ments our blindness! Let us turn to the pa- 
triots who walked with God and take up their 
aspiration as the purest and loftiest expression 
of patriotism : 

"Pray for the peace of the City of Peace. 
They shall have peace that love thee. 
Peace be within thy walls, 
And peace within thy palaces. 
For my brethren and companions' sakes I will now 

say, Peace be within thee. 
For the sake of the house of the Lord our God 
I will seek thy good." 



VII. 
ON GETTING RICH QUICK 



ON GETTING RICH QUICK 

He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be inno- 
cent. — Proverbs 28: 20. 

I. It is not a sin to be rich. 

The Bible abounds with consolations for the 
poor, but it nowhere classes the possession of 
wealth among sins. It says "the love of money 
is a root of all kinds of evil;" that "they that 
will be rich fall into many a snare," and it gives 
us a vision of a rich man in hell. But the busi- 
ness of making money and the fact of having 
money are, in themselves, honorable and praise- 
worthy. The Bible has its appropriate warn- 
ing for all classes, the rich among the rest. 
But there is no Biblical warrant for that type 
of socialism which classes the rich with crimi- 
nals and attempts to array society against them. 
On the other hand, it may be a sin not to be 
rich. Men who squander wealth in dissipation 
or live in poverty because they despise labor 
and self-denial are not innocent. Wealth rep- 
resents diligence, perseverance, energy, intel- 
lectual supremacy, and when it has been se- 
cured by means of these it is a badge of honor, 



132 The Good Life. 

entitled to our respect. Wealth is a powerful 
agent of progress, both material and spiritual, 
and because a good rich man can do more good 
than a good poor man, when their goodness is 
equal, wealth may be lawfully coveted and hon- 
orably rewarded. It is written that Jesus loved 
the rich young ruler, that He brought salva- 
tion to the house of rich Zaccheus, and that 
"He made His grave with the rich in His 
death." 

2. It is not foolish to be innocent. 

In Scotland they call a natural fool an inno- 
cent. And men of the, world often reveal their 
contempt for purity, uprightness and harmless- 
ness, the character that refuses to prey upon 
men's weaknesses or disadvantages or misfor- 
tunes, by the peculiar emphasis with which they 
declare such a person to be an innocent. Now, 
we ought to bring this word out into the open 
and try it by the most candid criticism. Is 
that man a sort of fool who esteems nothing 
worth having which cannot be got innocently? 
Henry Clay's assertion that he would rather be 
right than be President is foolishness to a poli- 
tician who always works for the office first and 
takes chances on being right. And so there are 
money-makers who regard with simple- 
minded astonishment the man who is conscien- 



On Getting Rich Quick. 133 

tious about the way he gets his money, who 
protests against common practices and artifices 
of business, and who would sooner take poison 
than dishonest gain. When they are not en- 
raged at him for being in their way, they laugh 
at him as a joke. Now, what is the reason men 
thus despise innocence? Surely there is such 
a thing as right, and surely men are not wholly 
given over to the love of wrong. By no means. 
Every man draws the line somewhere. But 
two reasons prevail with men in this matter. 

1. They give most consideration to that which 
presses hardest upon them. The grind of pov- 
erty is an awful, concrete reality, while the 
beauty of an innocent soul is an abstraction. 

2. "Because judgment against an evil work is 
not executed speedily, therefore the heart of 
the sons of men is set in them to do evil." And 
I think we will find these two combined into the 
settled conviction of men about moral distinc- 
tions. When the stress of our own wants is 
relieved, or when we judge the act of another 
person whose wants we do not feel, we are apt 
to be more severe. And when we see a punish- 
ment visibly attached to an action, we can feel 
more easily a moral condemnation of the act. 
Hence every man draws the line where his own 
wants cease and where visible punishment be- 



134 The Good Life. 

gins. Up to that line everything is innocent, 
beyond it everything is disgraceful. 

This, therefore, is the point of these remarks. 
However foolish one man's standard of inno- 
cence may appear to another man, every man 
has his own standard. There is even honor 
among thieves. To be innocent, according to 
one's own standard, may not be a very high 
attainment; may be, in fact, a species of de- 
pravity. But to be wrong, judged by one's own 
standard, is to be lost in the lowest hell. And 
so it is a very great question, this question of 
innocence. It is greater than the matter of 
food and drink, greater than present honors or 
future ambitions, greater than life, greater than 
death. It is the supreme test of the worth of 
every sort of possession, the complete defense 
against every attack, the consolation for every 
defeat. 

"He's armed without who's innocent within." 

3. A man may be both rich and innocent, 
but if he is forced to choose between these, his 
choice of riches will be his own undoing. 

To choose riches rather than innocence of 
heart and life is to choose that which has no 
moral value in preference to that which has. 
Whatever may be our estimate of the value of 



On Getting Rich Quick. 135 

wealth, and none of us despise it, yet we never 
think of it as moral value. Wealth gives us 
better food, better houses, easier lives, reputa- 
tion and power. But the most abandoned slave 
of wealth never dreamed of calling these things 
moral. Better food and better houses do not 
necessarily make better men; nay, how often 
they make men worse. Our Lord said, "How 
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the 
Kingdom of God \" Mr. Carnegie said the 
other day, "When I see a rich young man suc- 
ceed at anything I feel like taking off my hat 
to him, for it is much harder for a young man 
with wealth to make anything of himself than 
it is for a poor man." All experience shows 
that adversity, and not prosperity, is the school 
which teaches the really great lessons. It is 
hard for poor young men to make a fortune, 
but it is harder for a rich young man to make 
a man of himself. 

There has been dedicated recently in this 
country a Hall of Fame, designed to perpetu- 
ate the memory of our heroes and great men. 
Last month the tablets of some sixty of these 
immortals were unveiled, and not one of them 
had become famous by riches. And this is an 
impressive way of teaching the second great 
distinction between riches and innocence. If 



136 The Good Life. 

you would live in the memories of men, you 
must be something and do something, and not 
simply own something. If we ask the inspired 
Psalmist, "Who shall ascend into the hill of 
the Lord, or who shall stand in His holy 
place?" Or if we turn to those who keep the 
keys of our Pantheons and Westminster Ab- 
beys and Halls of Fame, we shall get always 
the same reply : "He that hath clean hands and 
a pure heart." And woe to the republic when 
it ceases to give its highest honors to clean- 
handed men and pure-hearted women ! I have 
not a word to say against rich men because they 
are rich. A college man should blush for such 
uncharitableness and ingratitude. But wealth 
may go too far even with its beneficiaries. It 
may be so sure of its own power as to despise 
the omnipotence that hides itself in the inno- 
cent life. And if so, it must be withstood; it 
must be taught that, although it endow col- 
leges, it cannot buy teachers; although it may 
give credit and reputation to the State, it can- 
not buy legislation. Far above the truculence 
of noisy satellites must be kept the serene splen- 
dor of American honor, whose halo is unpur- 
chasable by mere wealth, however great, and 
freely bestowed upon true worth, however 
modest. 



On Getting Rich Quick. 137 

Another contrast between wealth and inno- 
cence which many lose sight of is the judgment 
at the end of the two goals. The rewards of 
wealth are so real, so concrete and so simple; 
and innocence so often delays and disguises 
its rewards that to many wealth seems to bring 
no unwelcome judgments, and innocence to 
bring nothing else. Accordingly, we have 
made up our minds that the judgments of 
wealth and the rewards of innocence are both 
visionary and we are impressed by neither. 
We do not believe that they that will be rich 
"pierce themselves through with many sor- 
rows." We want to try if we may not get all 
the pleasures of wealth and escape all its judg- 
ments. But the rich know better. They know 
that the greatest millionaire is only the great- 
est caretaker. Not long ago I asked a man of 
large wealth if he would take ten million dollars 
as a gift on the sole condition that at the end of 
ten years he should restore it unimpaired, and he 
promptly responded, "No, sir ; I have as much 
as I can do to take care of what I have." A 
millionaire said to a friend : "I have struggled 
for years to get a fortune that I might retire. 
Now I have the fortune, but it will not let me 
retire." 

On the other hand, the judgments visited 



138 The Good Life. 

upon those who despise innocence are not vis- 
ionary, but work themselves out in punish- 
ments worse than stripes and imprisonments. 
So that if a man chooses wealth and succeeds 
he only chooses care and much sorrow, for 
these are part of wealth's rewards. Whereas 
to choose innocence and fail is only to lose what 
money can buy and to gain everything else. 

The trouble with us is that while we have 
not lost the sense of fear, we have lost the 
power of discriminating between what is and 
what is not to be feared. And as we are ruled 
by our fears we go on choosing blindly to 
escape from what is not to be feared and 
plunge into what is most of all to be feared. 
"Hell," says Carlyle, "generally signifies the 
infinite terror, the thing a man is infinitely 
afraid of, and shudders and shrinks from, 
struggling with his whole soul to escape from 
it. But the hells of men differ notably. With 
Christians it is the infinite terror of being 
found guilty before the just Judge. With the 
old Romans, I conjecture, it was the terror not 
of Pluto, for whom probably they cared little, 
but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously, 
which was their word for unmanfully. And 
now what is it, if you pierce through his cants, 
his oft-repeated hearsays, what he calls his 



On Getting Rich Quick. 139 

worships and so forth — what is it that the 
modern English soul does, in very truth, dread 
infinitely and contemplate with entire de- 
spair? What is his hell; after all these repu- 
table, oft-repeated hearsays, what is it? With 
hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it 
to be the terror of mot succeeding;' of not 
making money."' And alas ! more melancholy 
still, what we are not afraid of is the wasting 
of our fine powers in sordid employments, the 
numbing sense of isolation from all spiritual 
sympathies, the decay and destruction of all 
that distinguishes us as souls, the punishment 
of a dead heart and a distorted moral sense 
and a vacant mind. 

4. The spirit and the methods of getting 
rich at the present time are in conflict with 
the best interests of men and with God's order 
and must bring punishment. 

Men have always desired riches and have 
always striven for them. But in the main this 
desire has been such an impulse to industry 
and frugality that much good has resulted 
from it, and preachers have had to concern 
themselves principally in trying to withdraw 
men from this pursuit sufficiently to reserve 
some of their energies for other and better 



140 The Good Life. 

things. But now the eagerness for riches is 
not necessarily and not generally an eagerness 
to work, to be economical and to save. In fact, 
it is hardly possible to say any longer with ab- 
solute literalness that men work to get rich, 
and many would laugh at the suggestion of 
the olden time, that "making money" means 
to produce something of value to exchange for 
money. Making money in these days means 
getting money, and we do not concern our- 
selves about who made it. So the modern 
eagerness for wealth is rather destructive of 
industry than the contrary. We have a 
fever burning constantly through our pulses 
that makes us impatient of slow methods. 
We have almost brought ourselves to the point 
of despising honesty because it is slow. He 
who cannot get rich quickly is as miserable as 
he who cannot get rich at all. 

The result is that the main business of men 
today is speculation. Thousands of men are 
working at this or that vocation, having the 
appearance of practicing law or medicine, sell- 
ing merchandise, making machines, raising 
wheat and corn, who are only seeming to do 
these things. Their real business is in mar- 
gins, and they are carrying on these other 
things only until they realize on their bets. 



On Getting Rich Quick. 141 

All trades, all professions are on the street 
buying what they don't want and selling what 
they haven't got. A few preachers and teach- 
ers and other moral fossils cry out against this 
sort of thing, and tell young people that work 
is the only honest way to get rich. But it is 
Mrs. Partington against the Atlantic ocean. 
When a youth sees a man walk across the 
floor of the exchange and make twenty 
thousand dollars in twenty seconds, you may 
preach to him about work if you can catch 
him, but he is going to try the twenty- 
seconds plan first. And I really believe that 
the tremendous fortunes made and lost in 
minutes and seconds in that recent cyclone 
in Wall street has done more to prostrate the 
substantial business interests of our future, 
because of the effect on young men in making 
them despise the day of small things and slow 
methods, than any drought, fire, flood, famine 
or pestilence that has ever visited our shores. 
Fathers and managers and employers cannot 
give themselves up to speculation and expect 
to keep their children and employes satisfied 
with work. It would be very fine, no doubt, 
to keep the multitude raising wheat and corn 
so as to give the few a chance to corner it, but 
even the multitude learn after awhile the dif- 



142 The Good Life. 

ference between getting bread by sweating 
and by betting. 

Closely allied to this, if not its legitimate 
offspring, is social gambling. Rev. Dr. Hunt- 
ingdon, the rector of Grace Church of New 
York, had this to say in a recent sermon ad- 
dressed to his fashionable audience: 

"Is it true that there are many hostesses in 
fashionable life who will allow young men to 
depart from their drawing-rooms greatly im- 
poverished after having played games of 
chance in which they could ill afford to lose? 
Is it true that there are young women in good 
society who Openly display jewels which have 
been bought with profits made at the gam- 
bling table in their homes? How vulgar, how 
infamous ! 

"There can be no doubt that all this is true 
to a very large extent, and that such games are 
played under one high-sounding name or 
another in the drawing-rooms of houses where 
it is known there is no fear of a raid by the 
police. Indeed, the players are often those 
who are engaged in the effort to purify the 
morals of this city. Here we are with a com- 
mittee of five or of fifteen trying to rid the city 
of poolrooms and of policy shops, while be- 
hind closed doors of private houses, into which 



On Getting Rich Quick. 143 

no detective will dare enter, this gambling is 
said to be going on." 

We haven't gone quite so far in our rural 
communities yet, but we are following bravely 
on. The columns of country newspapers are 
seldom without notice of the operations of 
card parties where distinguished ladies reap a 
harvest of gold brooches, silver spoons, clocks, 
mantel ornaments and other valuables that are 
not made nor bought, but won by the same 
cleverness that has landed so many unfortu- 
nate gentlemen in jail who were too stupid to 
know the difference between vulgar gambling 
for money and refined progressive euchre for 
money's worth. What obsolete author was it 
who asked: "What's in a name?" Modern 
social leaders could have given him several 
volumes of distinction. 

Now, my young friends, I bring these facts 
before you for your candid consideration. 
You wish to be rich and you are planning to 
be rich. If you believed I could tell you just 
how you could get rich you would be willing, 
for once, to listen to a sermon an hour long. 

I am not going to presume upon such an 
attempt. But I think I can tell you what sort 
of punishments these methods of getting rich 
will bring upon you if you persist in following 



144 The Good Life. 

them, and perhaps the next best thing to know- 
ing how to get rich is to know how not to try- 
to get rich. If these punishments are real and 
certain no wealth can ever pay the price of 
them. 

a. There is first the sum of human selfish- 
ness enormously increased. 

This sort of eagerness for wealth becomes 
not only a passion, but the passion. It is such 
a tyrant in the heart that all sentiments not 
subservient to it are extinguished by it. Under 
its domination men act with the frenzy of 
panic-stricken mobs, who trample ruthlessly 
over the prostrate -bodies of women and chil- 
dren to get themselves to places of safety. To 
be rich in whatever way and at whatever cost 
— that is the sum of such lives. Education is 
nothing, traditions are nothing, human fellow- 
ships and sympathy are nothing. Men revert 
to the instincts of savages and lose in a mo- 
ment the refinement of a thousand years of 
civilization. 

And this spirit has become so general that 
the smallest communities are feeling its bale- 
ful influences. How many a sweet Auburn 
has shriveled up under its breath! The de- 
lightful family and social enjoyments of sim- 
pler days have given place to strife, division 



On Getting Rich Quick. 145 

and rancor. Those who used to meet as 
neighbors and friends are now combatants and 
enemies. To get rich we have broken up all 
the sweet amenities of intimate village life and 
are living in a state of war. 

And it cannot be long before the whole land 
will show the effects of this spirit in the char- 
acter of its citizens ; nay, it is already showing 
itself and illustrating Bishop Potter's recent 
assertion that "the passion for gain is the most 
tremendous menace to the honor and well-be- 
ing of the republic." 

"Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey, 
When wealth accumulates, and men decay." 

This spirit is behind all the bribery we are 
trying so vigorously to suppress. It is the im- 
pulse to the venality and corruption in our offi- 
cers. It used to be thought a low state of vir- 
tue for a man to do his duty for his salary. 
But such a man now ranks as a patriot, since 
offices are now sought not for the salary, but 
for what can be made over and above the sal- 
ary. Nominations are bought at prices greater 
than the whole salary will amount to if the 
office is secured. And "these be thy gods, O 
Israel \" This is the spirit American patriotism 
is being sacrificed to. 



146 The Good Life. 

b. Moral discrimination blunted. This is 
another form of punishment we are laying up 
for ourselves in our mad rush for wealth. We 
have learned to make a distinction between the 
ethics of business and the ordinary rules that 
control us as men. We have coined our dis- 
tinction into the phrase, "Business is business," 
by which we mean that although an act is in- 
defensible on ordinary grounds, it is allowable 
in business. Now, there is nothing more cer- 
tain nor more swift than the deterioration that 
results when men begin to split up their moral 
code into Sunday and Monday right and 
wrong. 

There is but one kind of honesty in all the 
world. And if we were not carried away with 
the rage for gain we would not tolerate for a 
moment the bastard honesty that simply suc- 
ceeds in keeping out of the penitentiary. We 
shall never cultivate honesty by passing laws 
and imposing punishments, but by returning 
to simpler manners and ways of living, by 
teaching young men by example, as well as 
precept, that money is not all of life ; by exhib- 
iting and extolling the inherent grandeur of a 
thoroughly innocent life that brings all acts to 
the same test, and by reserving our plaudits 



On Getting Rich Quick. 147 

and homage for the king of all characters — the 
honest man, God Almighty's gentleman. 

c. God and another life shut out. In 
naming this as one of the punishments of our 
eagerness for wealth I will perhaps not im- 
press those who most need the lesson. Thoughts 
of God and immortality are most unwelcome 
to those who are absorbed in the spirit of gain. 
And to have these removed from their minds 
altogether is a relief. Alas! this is the most 
distressing feature of the case. It is the infal- 
lible sign of mortification when pain lets men 
alone, and that man is morally doomed whom 
God leaves alone. We have gone systemat- 
ically to work to bring this result about. 

"The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 
Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; 
The winds that will be howling at all hours 
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 
It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, 
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 



148 The Good Life. 

Young men and women, will you be thus? 
Will you thus debase and dishonor yourselves 
as sons of God? Lift up yourselves, I beseech 
you, and stand upright as God made you. "Sil- 
ver and gold," says Euripides, "are not the 
only coin; virtue, too, passes current all over 
the world." Yes, and this, too, is the coin, the 
only coin of heaven. Whether we will think of 
it or not, we are all hastening to that other life, 
all going to make up our final account with 
God. In the light of that awful day, when our 
gold and all that gold can buy, shall drop in our 
hands to useless dust, I warn you, "Lay not up 
for yourselves treasures on earth where moth 
and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break 
through and steal, but lay up for yourselves 
treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust 
doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break 
through nor steal." And thus you will do more 
than secure your everlasting felicity. You will 
live the truest, highest life here on earth. You 
will gather and distribute here the riches that 
sweeten life and ennoble existence. And if you 
neither live nor die a millionaire, your words 
and deeds will be a richer legacy for those who 
love you, and more lasting, for they will en- 
shrine the immortal memory of a good and 
honest heart. 



On Getting Rich Quick. 149 

After I had written these closing words a 
letter came to me from a former student of this 
college which contains a tribute to its first pres- 
ident so strikingly illustrative of my theme and 
so just that I do not hesitate to add it here, not- 
withstanding my personal relations to the sub- 
ject of it, Dr. James Thomas Ward. 

"My real education began/' says the student 
referred to, "on the day when he took me from 
the street where I was playing in the dirt, and 
led me by the hand up to the college to be 
taught. But he had been teaching me on the 
road, and his words of tender interest inspired 
in me a love for him which never waned. 
Countless kindnesses marked the succeeding 
years. I take pleasure in recording that many 
times when swayed by doubt, when tempted to 
say that all men are scoundrels and the only 
problem is to find their price, my mind has 
gone back to that pure, sweet life, and I have 
believed and wished that I could emulate it. 
His memory is one of the dearest treasures of 
my childhood. Large endowments and splen- 
did buildings add to the efficiency of an insti- 
tution, but a spirit such as his can make a great 
college, no matter what its material equipment 
may be." 

Yes, my friends, Dr. Ward was not a money- 



150 The Good Life. 

maker, but there are few men rich enough to 
build as many precious shrines in human hearts 
as he erected. He lived a gentle, unsophisti- 
cated life, 

"And that which should accompany old age, 
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," 

he had in largest measure. He took with him 
into the life beyond an incorruptible inheri- 
tance, but he left that in loving memories be- 
hind him which all of us most envy, and few 
can say more than this : "Let my last end be 
like his." 



VIII. 
THE GOSPEL LAW OF TRADE 



THE GOSPEL LAW OF TRADE 

Give and it shall be given unto you ; good measure, 
pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, 
shall men give into your bosom. — Luke 6: 38. 

I fear that I may be considered presumptu- 
ous, if not sensational, in proposing to use this 
verse as an exposition of the Gospel Law of 
Trade. First, because of the widespread be- 
lief among business men that preachers gener- 
ally are very ill-equipped to expound any law 
of trade, being so little acquainted with practi- 
cal affairs ; and, secondly, because of the very 
general disposition among business men to re- 
sent the literal application of a verse like this 
to any affairs, much less to the complex and 
sensitive business world. I desire, therefore, to 
speak under correction of this criticism, avoid- 
ing all appearance of dogmatism, and aiming 
to emphasize only those principles that must 
apply to business because they are universal, 
and which even a preacher may apply as well 
as any man. And, in justification of my use 
of the text, I will say at this time simply that it 
must mean something, and that even if taken 
figuratively the meaning must still be found. 



154 The Good Life. 

I think it cannot be charity this verse describes, 
because the law of charity in the New Testa- 
ment is to give without hope of return, whereas 
the promise of return is made more prominent 
here than the command to give. Neither can 
this promised return be the divine reward of 
charity, both because the words expressly de- 
clare the contrary, and because of the general 
tenor of this whole discourse of Jesus which 
sets forth the principles of the social life and 
emphasizes everywhere the idea of reciprocity 
as the great source of human peace and good 
fellowship. 

There seems to be nothing left but the law 
of exchange, and I accept this as the meaning 
of this verse because so universal and so press- 
ing a condition of human society might be ex- 
pected to have a divine law, and because the 
great world of trade, dominated for ages by 
human greed and almost reduced to chaos by 
conflicting passions, is itself slowly but inevit- 
ably turning to the light of this great ideal as 
the promise of a better day. 

And now, entering upon an effort to inter- 
pret the text, we may all take the first step in 
agreement. Whether we are of the literalist 
or the symbolical readers, we all would admit 
that here is at least one very exact and very 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 155 

complete description of human desire. What 
we all are trying to get, and what we all think 
we are entitled to, is "good measure, pressed 
down, and shaken together, and running over." 
Moreover, it cannot be denied that there is a 
very great multitude among us who feel that 
they are not getting "good measure." The 
world of trade is seething with dissatisfaction. 
He who has only labor to give complains that 
the capitalist does not give good measure in re- 
turning to him the profits of his labor. The 
capitalist complains in like manner of the syn- 
dicate, and even the syndicate complains of ex- 
amining committees and unsettling political 
discussions. From top to bottom our money- 
changers are dissatisfied with the "measure" 
they are getting, until it has become in the 
truest sense a national question, affecting 
equally the smallest with the largest communi- 
ties — how we can amend our laws, how we can 
readjust our social and business relations so 
that every man may get "good measure," or, as 
the President phrases it, "a square deal." 

It concerns every man who has any faith in 
the New Testament as a divine book to inquire 
with all earnestness whether it can help us any 
in this universal search for the cure of a univer- 
sal dissatisfaction. We have gone to the ex- 



156 The Good Life. 

treme in these later days, it seems to me, in in- 
terpreting the New Testament in the light of 
modern life. The results have been barren. 
We have simply taken all reality out of the 
New Testament or transferred its realization 
to another life. It is time we attempted to in- 
terpret modern life in the light of the New Tes- 
tament. Let us be courageous enough to be- 
lieve and to maintain that God's book is still 
unrepealed and is still to be applied to all hu- 
man conduct. If this amounts to an indictment 
of modern life, it will not be a voice in the wil- 
derness. Modern Hfe is being freely criticised 
everywhere, and some of our most sacred idols 
of the market-place are tottering on their 
thrones. So far from being sure that nothing 
could be better than our present system, it 
would seem that the majority are almost ready 
to assert that nothing could be worse. 

Let us, then, begin our study with a state- 
ment of the present conditions of life in the 
business world. 

We have been doing business for thousands 
of years on the same principle. We have built 
up a science of political economy on this prin- 
ciple, and it is as sacred to most men as a 
divine law and as inevitable as a law of nature. 
This principle has been embodied in a system 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 157 

which we call competition, but which means 
different things to different men. The old- 
fashioned competition, which was said to be 
the life of trade, was the theory that the more 
rivalry there was in all sorts of business the 
better for the community, resulting in better 
service and lower prices. It was based upon 
the hope that the greed of one tradesman would 
be neutralized by the greed of another. It 
was a pleasing theory which few business men 
disputed and none believed or acted upon. 
The competition which guided the business 
man was, briefly stated, the rule of the strong- 
est, and the single aim of a business man, 
so far as he was a business man, was to com- 
pete so vigorously as to drive out all others 
in his line. Recent developments in the busi- 
ness world have given startling emphasis to 
this idea. It is a strenuous doctrine in these 
clays and does not shrink from asserting that 
none but fools or incompetents would hesi- 
tate to crush all rivals by any means not ex- 
plicitly forbidden by law. Going into business 
in these days is really going to war. Talk as 
men will from force of habit about the life of 
trade, men are doing business today on the 
principle of a competition that cares nothing 
for the life of trade, but that means prosperity 



158 The Good Life. 

to me and ruin to my competitor. This must 
be done honorably, of course — no cheating, no 
lying, no spying. But, on the other hand, no 
sentimentalism, no Quixotic notions of mixing 
benevolence with business, no nonsense about 
being my brother's keeper. 

That this method has no sanction in the New 
Testament Christians have always known, and 
they have escaped the confession that it directly 
condemns this method only by resorting to 
figurative and partial interpretations of what 
it does say. Men feel compelled to explain 
away texts like this we have chosen, not be- 
cause they are insincere, but because they can- 
not conceive how business can be carried on 
if such texts are followed literally. The doc- 
trine of competition is as much a necessity to 
the business world, they think, as the doctrine 
of gravitation is to the natural world. Let us 
then take a few moments to look at some criti- 
cisms of this doctrine which do not come from 
the New Testament and some of which are in- 
spired by a spirit wholly at variance with the 
New Testament. 

First, there is the indictment drawn up in 
the name of anarchy. This is the extreme pro- 
test against existing social arrangements, 
based on the contention that society itself is 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 159 

an infringement of human rights. To assume 
in any way or under any form of organization 
to dictate to a man what he may do or not do 
is oppression, and therefore, it is claimed, all 
government is a usurpation. Every man, 
according to this doctrine, is an independent 
sovereignty, amenable to nothing but his own 
will. 

Another form of dissatisfaction with the 
present order is socialism, which, in one re- 
spect, is the direct antithesis of anarchy. For 
while anarchy denies the right of society to 
do anything, socialism proclaims its right to 
do everything. 

It is not easy to describe any specific pro- 
gram as socialistic on account of the bewilder- 
ing variety of doctrines held under this name. 
But the name covers with general agreement 
the ideas of those who would carry the func- 
tions of government much beyond what has 
yet been practiced on any large scale. For 
instance, we do not permit the postal business 
to be carried on by private enterprise, although 
we allow it to conduct other forms of trans- 
portation. But the socialist would put into the 
hands of government all business that con- 
cerns equally the whole people. He takes the 
family as the type and would order the con- 



160 The Good Life. 

duct and life of the people without permitting 
individual initiative in matters of public con- 
cern, as the father directs his household and 
distributes to each according to his necessities 
and receives from each according to his ability. 
Still a third indictment is drawn against 
society in the sacred name of brotherhood. 
Communism is distinct from both anarchy and 
socialism. Like anarchy, it demands equality 
for all, but does not overturn government and 
law to reach it. And, like socialism, it con- 
cerns itself with the needs of society in the 
form of wealth, but with the way wealth shall 
be distributed rather than the way it shall be 
produced. All there is for each, is its motto. 
Private property is robbery, is its creed. It 
would bring about universal satisfaction by 
limiting ownership to what a man can person- 
ally use. There is enough corn annually raised 
in this country to feed all its inhabitants. The 
way to prevent hunger is to prevent men from 
storing corn which they can't eat and won't 
sell. There is enough land in this country 
to give every man, woman and child in it a 
farm of forty acres ; but instead of eighty mil- 
lion farms there are only about five million. 
There is enough wealth in this country to give 
every man, woman and child one thousand dol- 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 161 

lars, but the wealth of this country is practically 
in the hands of about two hundred thousand 
persons, and that number is constantly decreas- 
ing. The millionaire was the extreme exag- 
geration of the possibilities of accumulation 
fifty years ago; now he is commonplace. The 
communist, the socialist and the anarchist agree 
in regarding private property as the worst foe 
to human liberty and competition as its greatest 
instrument. 

We must not judge these doctrines by their 
exaggerations, nor turn them down contempt- 
uously because of their inconsistencies. Few 
doctrines in this world would stand these tests. 
There must be something wrong in a system 
which can bring together such contradictory 
doctrines in an attack against it. There must 
be something vital in an opposition which 
persists under so many names and times. We 
have to remember that there has never been a 
great speculative mind applying itself to the 
working out of an ideal state which has not 
condemned competition and favored one of 
these forms of opposition to it. In Plato's 
republic, in the early New Testament commu- 
nity and in frequent experiments of modern 
times the same ideas have appeared, aiming at 
the regeneration of society and the suppression 



1 62 The Good Life. 

of human selfishness. We may find abundant 
opening for criticism, and the severest criti- 
cism of all, as we reckon it, is that none of 
these dreams has succeeded; they are all in 
the air. It is a dreadful fate for an idea to be 
"in the air." But it is a worse fate for an idea 
to be in the dirt. Let us then turn with candor 
to the doctrine of competition and see where 
it is. 

The first step in the criticism of this doctrine 
is to state it. We can act on it without shame, 
but we cannot come into the precincts of God's 
Book and describe, it without qualifying our 
acceptance of it by the plea of necessity or by 
the claim that we do not carry it to its rigid 
conclusions. Competition in business has no 
support but in human selfishness. Carlyle 
calls it the swill philosophy, because men 
under its sway act upon the same impulse that 
pigs follow in getting at the trough — the quick- 
est and strongest get the most swill. Competi- 
tion legitimatizes what civilization outlaws. Civ- 
ilization has spent blood and treasure untold to 
substitute right for might, the fitting for the 
pleasing and ought for can. Competition re- 
verses all this and enacts as its Golden Rule, 
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to get, get it 
with thy might." Civilization makes laws to 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 163 

declare that another man shall not take away 
my property or my character or my life because 
he is stronger or shrewder or more alert than 
I, calling these things robbery, slander and 
murder. But competition condemns me to 
suffer all these if I am weak or stupid or slow, 
and calls it success. 

Now I know this is an exaggeration of the 
application of competition as we see it exem- 
plified around us. The business men we know 
are not robbers. But I am describing the log- 
ical conclusions of competition, and I assert 
that there are men who carry out this doctrine 
to its fullest reach, and that the doctrine itself 
furnishes the opportunity for the oppression 
and cruelty which cause the unrest we have 
in the business world. All slave owners were 
not slave drivers, and hence many good men 
in the South stood aghast at the lies that were 
circulated against the system of slavery. But 
the system was responsible for all the evils 
it permitted. And so will we come into con- 
demnation if we uphold a system which per- 
mits and fosters selfishness as the cardinal 
virtue, hardness of heart and rigor as indis- 
pensable to success. Is it not most inconsistent 
that we, who profess alliance with Him who 
called Himself the Son of Man, though He was 



164 The Good Life. 

the Son of God, should act as if we had the 
right to abandon all thought of human rela- 
tionship and deaden all its sympathies when 
we enter the realm of business? Do we not 
feel bound to risk our lives sometimes to save 
a life no way related to us except through our 
common humanity? And how, then, can we 
justify our hardness, our inflexible selfishness 
when we meet this same man, perchance, in a 
matter of business ? I risk my life to save him 
from death and then do my utmost to keep 
him from getting the means to live. "Is not 
the life more than meat?'"' And if we follow 
the higher law in the greater matter how can 
we call it impracticable in the smaller? 

But now let us turn to the method of Jesus. 
Whether it is practicable or not, you must 
judge; whether it is even intended to apply 
to business, you must decide. But it means 
something, and if we are so fortunate as to 
catch its right meaning we may safely leave 
the question of its practicability and applica- 
tion to settle itself. Whatever is true is always 
practicable in its proper sphere, and whatever 
is universally true is practicable everywhere. 

1. The first thing to strike us in this method 
of Jesus is that its animating principle differs 
from that of all other methods. Its first word 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 165 

is "give/' not "get." It is altruism, not egoism. 
The evils of competition might be cured by the 
prescription of socialism or communism. An- 
archy need not be considered, for that does not 
aim to cure anything ; its goal is death. But it 
is easy to see that selfishness is just as much the 
animating principle of these as it is of competi- 
tion. In them all the leading idea is getting. 
Jesus would turn us about, would give us a 
different point of view, would make the ideal of 
success consist in giving rather than getting. 

2. Note, again, that this method recognizes 
the right of private property. There would be 
no propriety in commanding us to give what 
we do not own. This accords not only with 
the most advanced political economy, but with 
the instincts of human nature, which no phil- 
osophy can permanently subdue. Every man 
has a peculiar and personal right to some things 
as against every other man in the world. You 
cannot have government among men without 
recognizing this truth. It is unnecessary to 
point out the frequent references in the teach- 
ing of Jesus recognizing this truth. The par- 
able of the talents sets it forth fully and leaves 
us in no doubt as to Jesus' attitude toward the 
right of property. It is simply a slander to 



1 66 The Good Life. 

call the New Testament a communistic or a 
socialistic book. 

3. Note, again, that in this method of Jesus 
for promoting exchange among men no vio- 
lence is suggested. It is giving, not spoliation ; 
it appeals to the owner, to him who has the 
property, not to him who wants it. Socialism 
and communism would legislate; Jesus per- 
suades. These would tear from unwilling 
hands the supplies for the needs of the dis- 
tressed. Jesus does not strive nor cry; He 
gives an example, and He keeps on speaking 
to the heart — "It is -more blessed to give than 
to receive." He would teach us that the re- 
demption of the world from poverty is to be 
brought about by the natural working of 
beneficent impulses under the guidance of the 
one sublime example. Man's independence, his 
rights, his enjoyment of his own are all left in- 
tact. But men are taught that the highest uses 
of all these are redemptive, and that redemption 
of every sort is a purchase of love, and not of 
property. 

4. If you are. still disposed to regard lightly 
this method of Jesus, or to think it, however 
beautiful, only an impracticable sentiment, I 
ask you to note again that Jesus is not here 
proposing an indiscriminate distribution and a 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 167 

reckless squandering of property under the in- 
spiration of charity. This is not charity, but 
exchange. The method has two sides — "Give 
and it shall be given unto you." It is in fact 
nothing less than a method for promoting per- 
fect circulation of commodities, which is the 
aim of all commerce. Jesus is not contravening 
legitimate business methods, but offering us a 
better one than we are using. He is outlining 
in a large way the true spirit in which all suc- 
cessful business must be conducted. Competi- 
tion has lived as long as it has because the spirit 
of Jesus in business men has ameliorated the 
rigors of their business principles. The most 
sordid men in business must still yield to the 
inexorable law of trade that there shall be an 
exchange of fair equivalents. And what is this 
but the text in other words, "Give and it shall 
be given to you ?" Selfishness may exhaust in- 
genuity, but it will be vain to attempt to get 
anything or to keep it without giving some- 
thing in return. 

5. Note, again, that this method, while ad- 
mitting the right of private property, denies the 
right of absolute property. While not ques- 
tioning personal rights as against other men, 
it does emphatically question all rights as 
against God. It, therefore, requires men to con- 



1 68 The Good Life. 

sider property as a trust, and it does not hesi- 
tate to bring them to account as trustees. It 
declares that the only rational basis of owner- 
ship is use. A man properly owns wealth 
when he uses it to carry on his designs. When 
he prostrates his designs, and gives up all his 
time to secure wealth, it owns him. Gifts of 
physical endowment, of intellect, of opportu- 
nity — everything is wealth properly used, but 
hoarded it makes wings and flies away. So a 
man who keeps his wealth to himself is not 
only an enemy to society, but to wealth itself, 
for in obstructing it he destroys it. 

6. Note, again, that this method of Jesus, 
although a paradox, conforms to the actual 
facts of life everywhere when it promises over- 
flowing abundance as the result of unstinted 
generosity. When the communist says, "Give, 
because I want what you have," and when com- 
petition says, "Get and keep," they offer only 
the law of selfishness and death. The only law 
of life is, "Give and it shall be given to you 
again." It is a law of nature. The clouds 
whisper it to the sea and the earth to the clouds, 
and all living things to the earth — "Give that 
we may live." It is the law of the harvest. 
From the storehouse to the fields and back 
again to the storehouse in bursting plenty, the 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 169 

rhythm keeps time to man's increasing needs. 
It is the law of progress, of enlightenment, of 
social uplift. Nothing lives but by that which 
something else gives. Jesus on the cross is not 
a solitary exception. The world is full of 
crosses today on which men are giving up the 
life they have that a fuller, better life may 
come in. 

Let us beware of calling that impracticable 
which God has put into practice everywhere. 
Jesus invites us to carry on business according 
to the laws of the universe. It is we who are 
impracticable and narrow when we attempt to 
set up a law of selfishness in defiance of God's 
law of brotherhood. 

We may reject the method of Jesus, some 
because it is inadequate, and others because it 
is impracticable. We may keep on in our way 
of making and hoarding and spending selfishly. 
But it is a serious question whether this present 
generation will not be compelled to choose be- 
tween this method and one of those now bat- 
tering at our defenses with cries of rage and 
greed. Certainly, the age of competition is 
doomed; its friends and foes are alike hasten- 
ing the hour of its downfall. What shall take 
its place? We have abolished slavery and we 
have made education universal. Freedom and 



170 The Good Life. 

enlightenment are noble instruments of prog- 
ress, but they are no less formidable as weapons 
in the hands of the distressed and poor. He 
who knows what he lacks and is free to pursue 
it will not long beg his supplies as an act of 
grace. He will not be held back by traditions 
associated with his distress, nor by reverence 
for those who are only his financial superiors, 
nor even by laws, when he once concludes that 
these are rich men's laws. When the vast mul- 
titude of those who lack awakes to find itself 
standing hungry before full granaries, listen- 
ing to the sounds .of revelry from brilliant pal- 
aces that break in on the groans that come from 
its own hovels, and with nothing between them 
but traditions and the artificial distinctions of 
modern society, what shall hold it back from 
making a forcible division of what we have re- 
fused to distribute? The bolts and bars that 
now secure our treasures are not forged of 
steel, but of good faith and fellowship. If 
these give way, let the revolutions of the past 
tell us how long our treasures will be secure. 
And let us ask ourselves what we are doing to 
perpetuate that good faith and fellowship and 
drive out the demons of hate which selfishness 
is continually calling up from the pits and 
slums of our business and social world. We 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 171 

have had more than enough of antagonism be- 
tween our social extremes. Whether we like 
it or not, God's great law of average is the only 
condition of human progress. If we will not 
lift up the lowest to our level, they will drag us 
down to theirs. We must be philanthropists 
before we can be successful business men. It 
is time we abandoned the childish folly of cov- 
ering our head and declaring that it is not 
thundering. The social storm is fast passing 
the muttering stage, and its volleys are becom- 
ing ominously distinct. In such times it is 
safest and wisest to come out into the open. 
There are as brave men in business as ever 
stormed a fort or charged an army. These 
clear-brained, strong-hearted men must open 
their eyes and look steadily on the inevitable. 
Poverty and distress are on the march. It is 
not our soup houses and our boards of relief 
that will call them to a halt. The want of this 
age is not to be satisfied by charity, but by 
honester and more humane business methods, 
by the broader and nobler conception of busi- 
ness as the exponent and instrument of social 
fellowship and mutual benefit. If you will not 
rise to this you may count your dollars and 
call them yours, but you cannot build a strong 
box safe enough to hold them. 



172 The Good Life. 

"There is a poor, blind Samson in this land, 

Shorn of his strength and bound with bands of 
steel, 
Who may in some grim revel raise his head 
And shake the pillars of the Commonweal." 

The tremendous significance of this warning 
lies in the fact that Jesus Christ loves Samson. 
Jesus would deliver Samson without destroy- 
ing the Philistines; but He will deliver Sam- 
son. Hence He first appeals to us; He ap- 
proaches us with the sweet reasonableness of 
His own example. It is time for this appeal to 
be heard in our factories and counting-houses. 
The love which conquered sin in us when law 
had failed would teach us how to conquer the 
sin and hate which misery breeds, how to 
transform our foes into our friends, how to 
bring in the good time of brotherhood, how 
to apply the Gospel law of fellowship in busi- 
ness and secure for ourselves that good meas- 
ure meted out by us and running back into 
our bosoms in overflowing gratitude. 

I am loth to believe that this appeal will fall 
upon heedless ears in any case unless it be those 
who have repudiated the authority of Jesus 
Christ. But I cannot believe that those who are 
just forming their political and social philosophy 
will be insensible to this great scheme of Jesus. 



The Gospel Law of Trade. 173 

And if I can induce you to take it up into your 
thought, to give it a trial, to weigh it soberly 
against the appeals made to you by the tradi- 
tions and customs of men, I shall do all that is 
necessary to the ushering in of a better time. 
The dawn will come up over the mountains of 
human opposition without noise or pomp, and 
we shall know it is here only by the light of 
love we see kindled in each other's eyes and 
by the heart-throb of sympathy we feel puls- 
ing between us. Dawn and not twilight, be- 
cause of the good measure still running over 
into ampler largess of "peace on earth, good 
will to men." 



IX. 
THE INSIGHT OF THE GOOD LIFE 



THE INSIGHT OP THE GOOD LIFE 

Nevertheless when the Son of Man cometh, shall 
he find faith on the earth? — Luke 18: 8. 

These words startle us as though they were 
the echo of much that we hear in these days 
of the failure of Christianity and the eclipse of 
faith. The antagonists of religion no longer 
assail it with brutal clamor and wholesale de- 
nial. They are attempting to take its life by 
elimination. They tell us that the need of our 
age is a rational religion; a religion without 
mystery and without faith; a religion depend- 
ing for its validity and efficiency not at all on 
what men believe, but wholly on what they do. 
And they would find in this text a prophecy of 
such a religion and such a time. 

But this question is asked by the Son of Man 
Himself, and it is not possible to class Him 
with the pessimists. It was prophesied of Him 
that He should not fail nor be discouraged. 
The text is not a confession or prophecy of 
failure, but a loving warning to those who may 



^Baccalaureate sermon at Adrian College, Michi- 
gan, June 19, 1904. 



178 The Good Life. 

miss the gracious benefits offered to those who 
believe. It is the closing reflection of a parable 
illustrating God's willingness to answer per- 
sistent faith. The Son of Man is saddened at 
the thought that all His efforts to make God's 
help real to man is limited by the unwillingness 
of men to ask for help or to believe in its reality: 

Let us clear our minds at once of the idea 
that this matter of faith is one of dogmatic 
theology, of believing in this or that form of 
words. It goes much deeper. Faith is not pre- 
sented in the New Testament as a habit or dis- 
position of mind opposed to skepticism. It is 
not the abnegation of the critical faculty in 
man. It is one sort of life opposed to another 
sort of life. To ask whether the Son of Man 
shall find faith on the- earth is to ask whether 
man is to give himself up finally to the life of 
the senses, to the life of the intellect, to any life 
bounded by the present age and world, or 
whether he is to go beyond this and live the 
life of faith, the life of the spirit, seeing the in- 
visible, ranging himself with immortals and 
communing with God. 

This is the large meaning we must give to 
faith, and this is a case where the definition is 
more important than the word. The whole 
case of the critical school against Christianity 



The Insight of the Good Life. 179 

falls as soon as we refuse to permit their nar- 
row definition of faith. The whole dark prob- 
lem of human destiny rests upon the sort of 
life men choose to live, and this life is the ex- 
pression of their faith. It is not civilization, nor 
scholarship, nor philanthropy, nor beneficent 
government, nor any of the devices of men 
that has the last word to say on man's future. 
Given all these without faith and the splendid 
procession of human achievement is but the 
parade of a day, dying at last in an eternal sun- 
set. When we seek to know how much far- 
ther man can go in illustrious progress, how 
much more he can do to glorify his creation; 
when we demand the answer to our ultimate 
hope for the race, we must find it in the answer 
to this question, Shall He find faith on the 
earth ? It must be quite worth our while, there- 
fore, to pause at this question and study the 
deep significance of the answer we may be able 
to reach as a result of our study. 

1 . And first, as to the apparent tendencies of 
the present age. It cannot be denied that there 
are many indications of a decided waning of 
faith among men. In the same sense, and with 
reference to the same things, it is certain that 
men do not now believe as they used to believe. 
There is some plausibility in the comparison of 



180 The Good Life. 

the race to an individual in this respect. The 
child believes everything, but with years and 
experience his faith as a guiding principle re- 
tires more and more, and he becomes skeptical. 
It is to some extent so with the race. In early 
times belief in the marvelous, acceptance of the 
most unlikely interpretations, is characteristic. 
Miracles, prophecies and all unaccountable 
events are eagerly received, and the more firmly 
held as they are least understood. "I believe 
because it is impossible." But as the race ad- 
vances this credulity is abandoned and men be- 
come critical, show less inclination to the mar- 
velous and more disposition to discriminate, to 
test, to prove all things. It is certainly charac- 
teristic of this age to demand the verification of 
all theories by actual tests of experience. It is 
to this more than to any other one thing we are 
indebted for the great sciences of nature. Chem- 
istry, biology and kindred sciences have almost 
had their growth in this age, and they have had 
their origin and their chief inspiration in the 
reliance upon experiment. To believe nothing, 
to accept nothing until it has been demonstrated, 
to collect facts and to try all theories by the 
rigid test of facts — these are the axioms of 
physical science. Hence many of the startling 
departures from the simple faith of our fathers 



The Insight of the Good Life. 181 

have originated in the laboratory, and some of 
the most skillful and important antagonists of 
Christianity have been eminent men of science. 
A similar tendency of more recent years may 
be seen in industrial movements. Men have 
begun to apply the experimental method there 
also. We have coined the word "business" to 
denote an attitude of hard, uncompromising 
hostility to all sentiment and to all faith in 
things we do not see and are not able to count. 
Men now go into business as they used to go to 
war. From the start they expect no conces- 
sions, and they resolve likewise to make none. 
The survival of the fittest, which means the sur- 
vival of the strongest, is the law of life and the 
excuse for all hardness of heart and question- 
able morality. To live the strenuous life, the 
rough-rider's life, in the saddle and pistol in 
hand, is accepted as the ideal worthy of a true 
man, while faith is regarded as pusillanimous 
and destined to contempt as well as failure. 

It would be strange, indeed, if such condi- 
tions did not have their effect upon the reli- 
gious life; that it should come to be generally 
supposed that the religion of the future, if not 
of the present, must be a religion without faith 
— a religion brought down from mystery to the 
business and bosoms of men. And this, I think, 



1 82 The Good Life. 

is the true account of the prevalent popularity 
of the critical school of religious teachers. To 
treat the Bible as any other book, the church as 
any other institution, and appeals to conscience 
as any other arguments is to subject religion to 
human approval and largely to eliminate its 
authority and to make faith superfluous. Have 
we, then, arrived at that period in human prog- 
ress when we can contemplate the removal of 
faith from the forces of human life? Has the 
scholar been educated beyond it ? Has the man 
of action found it unnecessary to his success 
and peace? Has religion found a substitute 
for it? These are the questions suggested by 
the text, and most appropriate, it seems to me, 
to an occasion like this. 

2. Let us examine this tendency with re- 
gard to our knowledge. 

It must be admitted that progress in exact 
knowledge is impossible without verification. 
The tendency of the present age is not wholly 
wrong. We are so constituted that we cannot 
be satisfied with mere guesses at truth. Wher- 
ever it is possible we must test all our knowl- 
edge by an appeal to the facts of experience. 
We have organs of sense for this very purpose 
and we would be disloyal to ourselves to refuse 
or neglect to use every faculty we possess to 



The Insight of the Good Life. 183 

arrive at truth. If any object of knowledge is 
within reach of the sense of touch and the 
sense of sight, and we use only the sense of 
sight we are not faithful to the truth. And if 
a theory is proposed for our acceptance and 
we use only reason when we might also use 
one or more of our senses, we are unfaithful 
to the truth. To know the truth is so high a 
responsibility that we are justified in any exer- 
tion to obtain it. Hence we can have no quar- 
rel with the method of the scientist. But then 
we must not make the mistake of assuming 
that verification by the senses is the whole of 
knowledge. Before we can verify anything 
by the senses we must start with faith ; that is, 
we must at least believe in the accuracy of the 
senses. When we speak so positively of what 
we know, of what we call facts, and of demon- 
strating facts, we only mean that we have seen 
something or touched something or heard 
something, and that we believe our eyes or 
hands or ears reported accurately to us. If 
we will not believe this we cannot demonstrate 
anything. Then we are obliged to believe in 
our own mental operations. The science of 
geometry, for instance, is built upon axioms 
which cannot themselves be proved. If we 
will not believe in the validity of our own men- 



184 The Good Life. 

tal processes how will we satisfy ourselves that 
a part is less than the whole or that equals to 
a third thing are equal to each other? All we 
can say for these statements is that our minds 
declare them to be true; they cannot be dem- 
onstrated. And the same thing is true of all 
reasoning. The most rigid logical formula, 
the most elaborate argumentation, inference 
piled upon inference even unto the mountain 
range of a great philosophy, reduce them- 
selves finally to a few axioms which cannot 
be demonstrated, but are simply believed. 

But our faith must go out beyond ourselves 
and our powers. The physical sciences are 
built on faith. Even now the almanac maker 
is calculating the events of the next year. He 
is preparing to tell us what eclipses we shall 
have, what changes of the moon, what appear- 
ances of the stars. How are such calculations 
possible? Only by faith. For they are all 
based upon the belief that nature will continue 
to do what it has done in the past. This faith 
is the only foundation we have for what we 
call natural law, the foundation of all the 
sciences. But consider what a tremendous act 
of faith this is. How do I know that next year 
will be as this? I do not know; I believe it. 
In fact, this faith is scarcely more than the ab- 



The Insight of the Good Life. 185 

sence of knowledge. Because I really know 
nothing at all of what next year will be, I be- 
lieve it will be like those I have known. I have 
nothing to guide me through nature but expe- 
rience, and experience tells me nothing what- 
ever about tomorrow. 

Conceive a man born with full powers of 
observation and reasoning. He is born, let us 
say, in December. The earth is frozen, the 
trees are bare, the woods are silent. How 
would he ever arrive at the knowledge that 
spring would come and the earth open its 
bosom in warm welcome to the seed, and the 
trees burst into blossom and leaf and fruit, and 
the forest grow vocal with melodies? Guided 
by his experience he would deny everything 
but December. His spring must arise from 
his faith. 

This much for our immediate knowledge. 
But by far the largest part of our knowledge 
is not immediate. We know, in fact, very little 
by our own observation or reasoning. We go 
into laboratories and test a few things, but the 
great sum of our science we get by listening 
to what others tell us. What is history but a 
great volume of testimony? What is biog- 
raphy but the witness of individuals to the facts 
of life as they have found them. What is all 



1 86 The Good Life. 

narrative and descriptive literature but the tes- 
timony of those who have traveled where we 
have not and seen what we have not? Will 
we make these facts our own? We must do it 
by faith. The process we call education is im- 
possible without faith. From the moment the 
child opens his primer until he writes his final 
thesis his education is more faith than any- 
thing else or than all things else. By faith he 
talks with Socrates and dreams with Plato and 
sings with Homer. Faith builds again for him 
the walls of Troy, thrills him with the defence 
of Thermopylae, transports him along the vic- 
torious marches of Caesar's legions. Faith 
reconstructs Nineveh and Babylon and Mem- 
phis, repeoples them with their vast and inter- 
esting throngs, and restores their civilization 
until he knows their life as well as he knows 
his own. Nay, going still farther back, soar- 
ing beyond the limits of the earth he inhab- 
its and the history he has inherited, faith 
breaks up the very floor of heaven, expands 
space into infinity and time into eternity, un- 
folds stars into worlds and suns into systems, 
and salutes him as the heir of all the ages, the 
prince whose heritage it is to know the truth 
and to be free. 

3. But I must remind you that knowledge 



The Insight of the Good Life. 187 

is not the whole of life. Indeed, so far is this 
from being true, we are disposed to say when 
we think of the supreme importance of that part 
of life not connected with knowledge at all, 
that knowledge is but a small part of life. If 
we were but intellectual creatures we would 
be shut in from most of the pleasures of life. 
It is what we desire, what we feel, that gives 
life its richness ; and it is our ability to act that 
gives us the sense of power. All we know has 
value for us only as it ministers to us in one or 
both these respects. 

And when we seek the explanation of our 
emotional life, why it is we desire, why we 
feel gratitude, sympathy, love, we know of 
course that it is to be found in our faith. The 
strong passion that plunges us into the suicide 
of sensual indulgences and the affection that 
inspires us with pure ideals are alike impotent 
to influence us except as our faith accepts 
them and indorses them. That impalpable but 
well-nigh invincible influence we call senti- 
ment, the last of our defences to yield to new 
ideas, who can reckon its share in the forces 
that move our individual and collective life? 
We stand in an obstinate resistance to the tide 
of new influences that surges against the 
heart's approaches, because "the tender grace 



1 88 The Good Life. 

of a day that is dead," "the touch of a vanished 
hand," weaves its spell over us. Kings may 
reign, but they cannot rule without paying 
tribute to the sentiments of their subjects. The 
forces of reason, the appeals of progress, the 
demands of new occasions, are all kept waiting 
in humble attendance upon the majesty of 
public sentiment. Yet what is sentiment? No 
analysis can perfectly account for it unless we 
call it emotion sublimated into faith. 

And what is the spring of action? With 
most of us this is the most apparent, as it is 
the most pressing function of life. However 
sunk we may be in mental stupor, however 
slow to respond to emotional solicitation, we 
must all act. And is not all action an expres- 
sion of faith? As infants we learn to walk 
by faith; every step is a balancing of doubt 
and faith, and we would never venture if we 
did not first believe. So it is throughout life. 
The whole social fabric is cemented by faith. 
We believe in our neighbor, we believe even 
in our enemy, and we could not carry on the 
business of a community ; in fact, we could not 
keep a community together without faith. For 
it is impossible to so guard ourselves against 
the enemies of peace and order as to be abso- 
lutely secure in our persons or property. Yet 



The Insight of the Good Life. 189 

we believe in one another. We invest our 
money where we cannot watch it; we trust 
our lives where all depends upon the faithful- 
ness of one man. We are obliged to go out 
beyond our power to know. Disaster may 
come and sweep away our whole dependence 
at one stroke, but still we trust. For what 
else can we do? We must live and we must 
live together. And he who would teach us 
universal skepticism, who would rob us of trust 
in our fellow-men, would deserve to be called 
the enemy of mankind. "Shall He find faith 
on the earth ?" Yes, as long as men are men ; 
as long as we must live together and for one 
another we must have faith, for otherwise we 
cannot live at all. It is as much a social as an 
intellectual necessity to believe. 

The business world is an illuminating exam- 
ple of this necessity. Its present condition 
illustrates, as has been said, the tendency of 
the age away from faith. But it must be added 
that it also illustrates the baneful effects of that 
tendency. The business world has gone away 
from faith ; and it has also gone into a state of 
war. Peace has given place to unrest, and 
faith to suspicion and all uncharitableness. 
Men are everywhere seeking a remedy for this 
deplorable condition without success as yet. 



190 The Good Life. 

But all are agreed that the true remedy is to 
be found somewhere in the sphere of faith. 
There will never be peace until men have 
learned to respect one another and deal with 
one another on the basis of mutual confidence. 
Surely if God is teaching men anywhere the 
necessity of faith He is teaching us by the 
threatening aspect of the labor world the futil- 
ity of those schemes that would ignore it. 

4. But it is evident our Lord is thinking of 
far more serious matters than these in propos- 
ing this question. And if I have delayed you in 
arriving at the vital concern of the text, it has 
not been from any depreciation of it. 

I have thought that you might best be led 
to the true answer of this question along the 
way of these less important and preliminary 
indications of faith. I have wanted to make 
you feel that if we are so constituted, intellec- 
tually and socially, as to be unable to live or 
move or have our being in these realms with- 
out faith, much less can we do without it in 
matters of infinite concern to us here and here- 
after. I have wanted to make you think that if 
mental and social salvation are conditioned on 
faith, so that he who will not believe shall 
neither think nor feel or enjoy the true man's 
heritage on earth, it is not strange to expect 



The Insight of the Good Life. 191 

eternal salvation to be likewise conditioned on 
faith, so that he who will not believe shall not 
enter into life. And if we would call him an 
enemy of mankind who would teach men to 
mistrust their fellow-men, what shall we call 
him who would rob them of their faith in God ? 
And, then, I wanted to take faith out of the 
narrow significance we are prone to give it, and 
show you how wide is its range, how univer- 
sally it prevails, and what a constant factor it 
must be in all our efforts to reach any excel- 
lence or to make any progress. It is not be- 
cause we are exhorted to be Christians or as- 
pire to be theologians that we are concerned 
about faith. It is because we are men, and be- 
cause the life we live, if we live the true life, 
the life appropriate to us as men, we must live 
by the faith of the Son of God. The critical, 
skeptical school so much in vogue today would 
teach us to deride faith as childish and unwor- 
thy a rational, educated man. And another 
school, no less misguided, it seems to me, would 
teach us to scoff at science as profane, and re- 
quire us to limit faith to mere credence of un- 
intelligible statements of mysteries. But God 
is wiser and broader than all the schools, and 
He would teach us that this world and all 
worlds are His ; that the truth of nature and 



192 The Good Life. 

all truth are His ; that life in the body and all 
life are His; that faith is the gift of God, the 
divine second sight, the final and supreme fac- 
ulty by which alone we can attain the highest 
truth or the highest significance of any truth. 

And what more shall we say? For time 
would fail us to tell all the victories of faith. 

By faith the scientist knows that the worlds 
were framed by the Word of God. By faith 
kings reign and government continues among 
men, and peace and prosperity wait on civiliza- 
tion. By faith we know and control ourselves. 
By faith we rise from barbarism and ignorance 
to rejoice in a freer, broader resurrection to 
unlimited capabilities. By faith we become the 
children of Abraham and the disciples of Christ 
and fellow-citizens of the saints who believe 
God and know the truth and are free. By faith 
we come to God through the new and living 
way of blood atonement, and find peace of soul, 
and are made partakers of the divine nature 
and enter upon the realization of the glories of 
immortality. By faith heaven is opened and 
our earthly trials and privations are explained 
and our highest aspirations are satisfied, and 
life, eternal life, is blazoned on the charter of 
our privileges. 



The Insight of the Good Life. 193 

"Shall He find faith on the earth ?" Because 
man is more than matter, more than animal, 
more than reason ; because man is soul, whose 
very breath is faith, I answer, yes. And be- 
cause faith is more than creed, wider than 
science and all knowledge, profounder than 
logic and all philosophy, and mightier than 
law and custom and politics, I answer, yes. 
Man was not made to perish, and while he lives 
he must believe. Man was made for God, and 
to rise to the life of God he must believe. 

We live here in much ignorance, in much 
uncertainty. We see through a glass darkly. 
We grope through life with painful forebod- 
ings about many things, and sometimes the 
darkness forces from us a cry of terror and dis- 
may. But the light is not all gone out in us. 
A star is shining over our way, and it kindles 
a light in us. We walk in the dark, but we 
walk by faith, and as we go there grows in us 
the "passionate intuition" of a coming day. 
We know not all the road we must take, but 
our hearts are cheered by faith, and a great 
courage rises in us that the way we go is not 
a way of delusion or danger, but "the path that 
shineth more and more unto the perfect day," 

"The great world's altar stairs, 
That slope through darkness up to God." 



THE REWARD OF THE GOOD LIFE 



THE REWARD OF THE GOOD LIFE 

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. — Matthew 
5: 10. 

To those who read the New Testament 
thoughtfully it must appear that it is more 
concerned with the good life than with any- 
thing else. Other things it touches; this it 
comprehends. The sermon from which the 
text is taken, most elaborate of all the recorded 
utterances of our Lord, is not a theological 
discussion, but an answer to the question, 
"What is the Good Life?" And it cannot be 
a mistake to assume that you would prefer to 
listen at this supreme moment in your career 
to something fundamental, something that is 
more than a topic of the times. If your college 
experience has meant what it should have 
meant to you, it has been holding up before 
you daily the supreme worth of good living, 
and the sermon which usage has denominated 
the laurel of that experience should be a fitting 
crown to the advice of that career. The theme 
of the good life, however, is too broad to con- 
sider in its entire scope, and I have chosen a 
fragment of it that I may offer you some sug- 
gestions on the Reward of the Good Life. 



198 The Good Life. 

The first and the last Beatitude close with 
the same words — "for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven." This I take to be a significant repe- 
tion. In their description of the good life the 
Beatitudes do not mean that there are eight 
different forms of this life in as many differ- 
ent individuals ; as though one man should be 
blessed because he is poor in spirit, and an- 
other because he mourns, and another because 
he is meek, and so on. But these are all ele- 
ments of every good life, and no man can claim 
to be good who ignores any of them. Good- 
ness is not to be cultivated in spots or put on 
in patches. It must be wrought out as a homo- 
geneous whole. The good man is good in 
every element of his character. The Beatitudes 
are not haphazard guesses at good qualities in 
various men, but they are all necessary to make 
up every good life, and every person is bound 
to strive after every one of them. Nay, it is 
scarcely possible to have any of these qualities 
without having them all, so completely do they 
support and supplement each other. 

And as is the life, so is the reward. This 
specific promise of the kingdom is not made 
to two classes of persons, nor is it a blessing 
attached to two separate qualities in the same 



The Reward of the Good Life. 199 

person. I think the repetition is of the nature 
of a summary. We enter upon the good life 
by becoming poor in spirit. As soon as we 
enter poverty of spirit we enter not only a 
quality of mind and heart, but the reward of 
that quality. Entrance upon the means or con- 
ditions of the life is at the same time entrance 
upon the end or object of it. And so our first 
step in grace is a step also in glory. The poor 
in spirit begin at once their citizenship in the 
kingdom of heaven. Then, when the final at- 
tainment is reached, when endurance completes 
what humility began, the result is the same in 
fullness that it was in beginning — "the king- 
dom of heaven." 

And so the first thought I would impress 
upon you is that the reward of the good life 
is not some magical result, not a sheer inter- 
ference of omnipotence with the ordinary 
course of human nature, not something we get 
either by purchase or by prayer. It is an at- 
tainment. It is a result wrought out by us and 
in us in the ordinary development of a human 
career. It begins on this earth and is concerned 
with mortal affairs. It is a blessedness which 
Christ came to deliver to men as a gift which 
yet must be worked for, as a grace which yet 
must be attained. "Blessed are ye" — to make 



200 The Good Life. 

that possible God revealed His will, and Christ 
gave His life, and the Holy Spirit was sent to 
men. But to make it actual, only the human 
will and effort can avail. And so our Lord 
would teach us when He says, "The kingdom 
of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent 
take it by force." 

What, then, is the kingdom of heaven? It 
cannot be exclusively a future state or place 
of blessedness, for those who live the good life 
have it here and now. It is not meat and drink, 
but righteousness, joy and peace. It is not, in 
fact, any place, state or thing external to us, 
for "the kingdom of God is within you." . 

So, then, we ought to emphasize the idea that 
the reward of the good life is heavenly, and not 
earthly, in the sense that it attaches to the spirit 
rather than to the flesh; that it is wrought in 
us rather than given to us, and that it makes us 
better rather than happier. 

The idea of a kingdom is most frequently 
associated in our minds with something exter- 
nal only, and with an external something which 
promises gratification. Jesus was continually 
reminding His disciples that His kingdom was 
not of this world, yet they did not finally aban- 
don the idea until they saw Him crucified. 
Their longing for His kingdom was largely 



The Reward of the Good Life. 201 

based on the expectation of sharing certain 
pleasures and honors. And our own notions 
are often as crude as theirs. We know, of 
course, that our King is a King of the truth, 
a Ruler in the world of ideas and sympathies, 
and that His true subjects are those who hear 
His voice and follow because they are also of 
the truth. But still we expect the truth to be 
embodied somewhere. It may be in a book, it 
may be in a church, it may be in some form of 
civil government. But somehow and some- 
where we think we will find it visibly repre- 
sented in the world. 

No doubt this expectation is partly true and 
may be partly realized. The kingdom of 
heaven is certainly revealed in this world. But 
these manifestations are sometimes mistaken 
for the hidden power. For instance, God's 
church is invisible, hidden in the human heart, 
yet if it exists there, it will be certain to mani- 
fest itself in some form of external organiza- 
tion. On the other hand, it is possible to have 
the organization without the hidden church, 
and even if both exist, and men see only and 
think only of the outward form, they are de- 
ceived as to what God's kingdom really is. So 
if we should count him blessed who is con- 
nected with this outer organization only on the 



202 The Good Life. 

ground that our text declares, "for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven," we should miss the real 
point of the promise, because we are mistaken 
as to what the kingdom of heaven is. 

There are still many who follow Jesus for 
the loaves and fishes. Not, I mean, in any base 
way. But they do not comprehend any other 
blessings of religion than those which can be 
expressed in terms of material well-being, and 
therefore they do not desire any other. Take 
the gold from the streets of the New Jerusa- 
lem, the harps and crowns from the blessed 
saints, and heaven is emptied of most of its 
riches for such Christians. They take religion 
as they take medicine — for the good it will 
bring them hereafter, or at least for the ill it 
will save them from. They want the Bible; 
they want to belong to church; they want all 
that appeal to men as outward signs of power 
and privilege; they want to go to heaven, but 
beyond such things they know nothing and 
they ask nothing of the good life. 

Now, we ought to understand and frankly 
admit that whatever worth such things have, 
they are not the kingdom of heaven. The man 
who lives the good life lives the life of the 
spirit, and he ought to expect that the reward 
of such a life will be expressed in spiritual 



The Reward of the Good Life. 203 

terms. It is not to add dollars to his income 
nor pleasures to his existence, but it is to de- 
velop qualities of mind and heart, to set his 
nature free from sin, to expand it in all holy 
impulses, to bring to it a sense of nearness to 
God, the uplift of a power from above that 
dwarfs this world and makes him superior to 
its claims and its penalties because he registers 
himself as a citizen of another world, and is 
here but a sojourner. 

Doubtless it may not be the way to com- 
mend the good life to young people to say 
these things, for this seems to resolve all the 
gains of godliness into vague generalities of 
gains to come, whereas what men of this age 
demand in both faith and morals is a dividend- 
payer. Their schedule of values must be defi- 
nite and negotiable in all the banks of time. 
Hence it has come to be a popular way of 
speaking to say that Christianity pays, empha- 
sizing the statement that godliness has the 
promise of the life that now is. Well, it has. 
But what, then, is the blessedness even of the 
life that now is? It is just as false for this 
world as for any world to say that the blessed- 
ness of it comes from what we get out of it. 
We call him "miser," wretched, who loves 
money for itself. But this is not the fault of 



204 The Good Life. 

the money. To love knowledge for itself, so- 
cial position for itself, anything for itself, is to 
be no less a miser. All the good we can get 
out of any life is the good wrought into our 
own selves. 

The New Testament is like every other chart 
of the good life. It exhorts us and teaches us 
to broaden our view and our sympathy so as to 
take into our life larger elements and thus 
make ourselves larger. If we will not grow 
larger so it is vain for us to hope to come into 
the larger life. The only legitimate hope of 
heaven any man can have must be based on his 
present possession of heaven. And the worst 
indictment against our age is that in its ambi- 
tion to make things rather than men it is brib- 
ing men to sell their hope of this larger life for 
present, material gain. But to you who are so 
soon to come under the spell of this spirit of the 
age I appeal in solemn warning. Don't sell 
this hope so cheaply, for you are selling your 
hope of heaven. Don't sell it for any price, for 
you are selling yourself. You are of more 
value than many stocks and bonds. Don't sell 
yourself to them nor for them. Don't commit 
the unspeakable blasphemy of recreancy to the 
integrity and majesty of your own soul. "Know 
ye not that ye are the temples of God ?" 



The Reward of the Good Life. 205 

Again, we should emphasize the fact that 
this blessedness of the kingdom of heaven se- 
cures to our life the order and stability which 
are essential to the idea of a kingdom. 

I have tried to show you that the good life is 
a growth, and that all the Beatitudes set forth 
separate and progressive phases of this life as 
it is developed in us. We would expect the 
reward to be similar ; not some new thing given 
to us as a prize, having no connection with the 
life. Scriptural blessedness is never of this 
sort. It is like Scriptural condemnation — al- 
ways a part, or rather the product, of the effort. 
"Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap." 

The trouble with most of us is not that we 
are not good at all, but that we are not good 
on any intelligible plan; we do not show the 
symmetry and fixedness of a kingdom. We 
are good today and bad tomorrow. We are 
good in this direction and bad in that. Today 
for no special reason we give alms ; tomorrow 
for no special reason we refuse to give. We 
have no particular temptation on the side of 
honesty, and so, being very strong in that 
virtue, we magnify it at all times and condemn 
unsparingly those who lack it. But while we 
are honest, we are not so careful to be truth- 



206 The Good Life. 

ful or pure; and the old sarcasm still pierces 
our weakness, that — 

"We compound for sins we are inclined to 
By damning those we have no mind to." 

Perhaps none of us would be as good as we 
are if it were not for temptation. But this is 
the weakness of a goodness which is the out- 
come solely of experience with temptation; 
temptations are isolated, disconnected, and the 
goodness following victory over these must 
be spasmodic and one-sided. Whereas we 
ought to build up our goodness on all sides. 
We ought to cultivate honesty even if we have 
few opportunities to steal, and benevolence 
even if we have nothing to hoard. To make 
all-round good men is better than to make 
specialists in goodness. Some men seem per- 
fectly complacent in considering their moral 
limitations. It satisfies them to say: "I have 
no turn for that sort of goodness;" and they 
feel as indifferent about it as if it were a mat- 
ter of architecture or music. 

How much nobler was the idea of the 
heathen Terence, who said: "I am a man, and 
nothing belonging to a man is foreign to me." 
And how infinitely nobler is the conception 
of our Lord. His followers belong to a king- 



The Reward of the Good Life. 207 

dom; they are not moral anarchists. They 
live and work in a kingdom with fixed laws. 
What they develop stays developed and joins 
itself on to all the fixed facts of the kingdom. 
Their goodness is not the evanescent senti- 
ment of a good impulse ; their meekness is not 
born of some temporary depression of soul; 
their purity is not the flaring up of some un- 
explained aspiration. In fine, their morality 
is moral growth and not moral decoration. The 
same principles that bind the plant life through 
its fixed stages of "first the blade, then the ear, 
then the full corn in the ear ;" that hold the ele- 
ments steady to their immutable cohesions in 
gas, liquid and solid ; that repeat in animal life 
the ever-enduring characteristics of parent in 
offspring through a thousand generations — 
these are the eternal laws which God has 
fixed about the perfect moral life. 

And the blessedness of this life is the certi- 
tude and joy of abiding in that state into which 
it grows. When we submit ourselves to these 
laws and grow into goodness, not by accre- 
tion, but by selection and assimilation; when 
we develop these qualities of the heavenly 
and perfect life in their order and unto their 
perfection, we come into the natural and in- 
evitable blessedness of it ; we are in a kingdom 



208 The Good Life. 

of moral excellence. We are girt about with 
everlasting securities in our goodness. Not 
having put on goodness as a whim, we do not 
put it off in a pet. It comes to be our second 
and better nature. And because we have built 
our moral pyramid on its base and not on its 
apex — building always with true lines and on 
a fixed plan — our tower stands even when the 
rains descend and the winds beat upon it. We 
are in a kingdom and our King is on the throne 
and His sceptre ruleth over all. 

Again, the blessedness of this reward is 
revealed in a kingdom which is not of this 
earth or of this age ; but a kingdom of heaven 
and therefore of infinite range. 

This will not appeal to you so strongly now 
as it will in later years. To the young, life is 
limitless in possibilities and range. You will 
discover that this is due to a defect in your 
perception, to your limited experience and to 
your boundless imagination. I would not 
dampen your ardor nor take from you any 
part of the lively hope you now enjoy. But 
as I know the time will come when the earthly 
life will shrivel to a span in your contempla- 
tion; when you will say, as the generations 
preceding you have said : "Few and evil have 
the days of the years of my pilgrimage been ;" 



The Reward of the Good Life. 209 

because I know you will not have time to do 
all you hope to do and will feel the bitterness 
of inadequate powers and shortened range; 
nay, will come down to your grave at last with 
so many unfinished plans, so many deferred 
hopes, that you will cry out with Beaufort: 
"What ! will not death be bribed ?" Because I 
know this experience certainly awaits you I 
appeal to you to make provision for that time. 
"Art is long and life is short." To learn how 
to live — what art is greater than that? Be 
sure we need more than the few days of our 
allotted three-score years and ten on this earth 
to learn that art. A ripe and scholarly Christian 
at the age of eighty said to me : "I seem to have 
spent eighty years learning how to live, and 
now when I think I know, I must cease to live, 
unless there is another life. Does not that 
make heaven necessary?" 

Why, my friends, what meaning can all 
our striving have if no other life awaits us? 
This little life hardly gives us time to inspect 
the drawings of the great temple the Master 
has given us to build. Are we to leave life 
unfinished and drop into eternal f orgetf ulness ? 
Are all our purposes to go incomplete, our 
aspirations cut off abruptly and the arch of 
life broken to discourage those who come 



210 The Good Life. 

after us and to mock the dream they cherish? 
No fantastic chimera of a madman's brain 
could be wilder than such a thought of life. This 
life is too significant and too great to be snuffed 
out thus. It must go on to join immortal 
existence somewhere. Thank God, then, for 
this Beatitude which reveals the manner of it. 
"Theirs is the kingdom of heaven." They who 
enter upon the good life plant the seed of 
heaven in their souls, and while they enter the 
kingdom of heaven, the kingdom also enters 
into them, "for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven." The seed which in this uncongenial 
clime yet bears such noble fruitage as meek- 
ness, purity, mercy and peace must flower out 
somewhere into the immortal glory of heav- 
enly perfection. The range of their earthly 
life is narrow and shadowed by the weakness 
and imperfection of the flesh, but it expands 
under this inspiration to the horizon of the 
everlasting years. They are not the creatures 
of a day, but of all time; not citizens of a 
world shut in by the hard limitations of matter 
and time, but they look for a city whose 
builder and maker is God. The life begun 
in them by God shall complete itself in God. 
Out from the shadows and uncertainties of the 
terrestrial it sweeps into the sunlit mountains 



The Reward of the Good Life. 211 

of perfection and peace. The voyage charted 
across a troubled sea finds at last the haven 
within the veil. 

"We sail, men say, upon the deep, 
But lo ! our masts are high ! 
And tho' we plow the waves below, 
Our sails are in the sky. 
Set high ! forever high I 
Our sails are in the sky." 

After the Jews had been expelled from 
Palestine they still kept up the celebration of 
their Passover festival, standing, with girt 
loins, staff in hand, eating unleavened bread 
and bitter herbs and with much bitterness of 
soul, but still encouraging one another by 
repeating this formula of faith and hope: 
"This year we eat the Passover here in a 
strange land, but next year we shall eat it in 
the land of Israel. This year we eat it stand- 
ing as slaves, but next year in the land of 
Israel, reclining as freemen. This year with 
staff in hand as. exiles, but next year we shall 
be gathered home." 

It is the formula of the good life. To every 
follower of it there are glimpses of a sky, far 
off, indeed, but radiant with promise of morn- 
ing. This year we labor, but next year we 
shall reap. This year we groan, being bur- 



212 The Good Life. 

dened, but next year we shall take up the chant 
of deliverance. This year we are pilgrims and 
sojourners, but next year we shall enter our 
kingdom which is in heaven and sit down on 
our thrones. The children of this world stand- 
ing by as we cheer ourselves with such words 
deride our faith and call upon us to give up 
our hope as a dream. But why should we 
desolate our life that we may become as poor 
as they? If this be but a dream, let me dream 
on. I would not waken to live as a beast, to 
toil as a slave, to struggle as a maniac. In this 
dark world of labor and sorrow let me catch 
some light from above; let the music and 
peace of Paradise thrill my poor spirit and lift 
it out of its prison house. 

But if there is no heaven; if there is noth- 
ing better than this world; if life has no out- 
look, no hope, no sunrise of an ampler morn- 
ing — then, O God, if there is a God, in mercy 
smite me now to dust and quiet at least my 
ceaseless unrest; give me the nepenthe of 
eternal sleep in the nothingness from which 
I came; and let men complete the mockery of 
my existence by writing over my nameless 
grave : "He lived and he is not. He thought 
he was more than dust, but his thought was 
nothing. He toiled after imperishable ideals, 



The Reward of the Good Life. 213 

but they were never realized because they were 
nothing. He lifted his heart to the boundless 
path of love and dreamed he was following the 
path of God, but he laid his head on a pillow 
of stone and he will never awake, for the path 
was a mirage and love was a dream, and his 
dream was nothing, and God was nothing, 
and all is waste and void, and darkness is over 
the deep." 

O pitiless doctrine of devils! I defy thee! 
With the highest and holiest instincts of my 
nature I denounce thee the supreme lie. If I 
can lift against thee but a dream, it is a dream 
of light, and thy hideous shadows must flee 
before it. 

And, O Paradise ! I would embrace thee if 
thou wert only a dream, for thou bringest thy 
guests into the chamber of peace whose win- 
dows open to the sunrise. But thou art more, 
infinitely more, than a dream. My soul crieth 
after thee. My reason inexorably demands 
thee as the inevitable, the necessary comple- 
ment of this poor world's deficiencies. Thou 
art life's only explanation. Thou art God's 
complete vindication. Thou turnest man from 
destruction, and life is worth living. Thine is 
the infinite expanse on whose ample verge is 
room enough to write out all the spirit's long- 



214 The Good Life. 

ings. We cannot live without thee, and, hold- 
ing fast to thee, we cannot die. O Paradise! 
embrace us today with thy light and warmth; 
breathe on us thy odors ; wrap us in thy peace. 
So shall our tired and thankful souls freshen 
again for all that yet awaits us, and whether 
we wake or sleep it shall be in Paradise, for 
ours is the kingdom of heaven. 



AUG 24 1905 



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